Super Escort Mission began with a simple idea: good criticism for bad games. All too often when a game gets labeled as bad it is simply written off by both critics and the public as not worth even a second thought. It’s a mentality rooted in the game hype magazines of the 90s, where reviews were little more than a buyer’s guide and a bad game not worth buying is hardly worth discussion beyond warning readers against ever playing it.

The games industry, and the media covering that industry, has evolved considerably since then, yet the idea that games must reach some arbitrary quality threshold is still alarmingly common. My idea was to help shift that paradigm, giving conventionally “bad” games the in-depth critique they deserved but were so often denied.

But as I made my list of “bad” games I wished to cover, I found myself unpleasantly restricted by my own premise. I still wanted to write about my intended bad games, of course, but I also want to write about the awkward, the odd, and the unintuitive. What about good games marred by a singular awful moment like the elevator defense sequence in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time? What about the evolution of awful menus and clunky inventory management in otherwise excellent RPGs? And what about great games that were just too odd to break through into the mainstream critical consciousness? “Bad” is a subjective term after all, and I didn’t want any of its implications to be left out.

And so, borrowing a name from one of gaming’s most infamous design pratfalls, I am creating Super Escort Mission: a site dedicated to the in-depth analysis of all that is awkward, unintuitive, and odd in game design. Not out of hate or malice, but out of a love of games and a curiosity as to how the medium can learn and grow from past failures. And maybe even discover that some of what we thought were past failures had some brilliant nugget to them which was actually far ahead of its time.

Super Escort Mission will never be your one stop for all the latest gaming news and reviews, but it isn’t meant to be. Those sites already exist. Think of Super Escort Mission as a game criticism multivitamin; a supplement that can fill crucial gaps in your regular gaming media consumption by highlighting games and design trends that weren’t always successful, and then dissecting why.

Super Escort Mission is a journey into the awkward and awful depths of game design, and I hope you will join me in the coming months as we embark on that path together.

 

A more finished site will roll out later this summer, but until then I at least wanted to get a mission statement up as a placeholder for things to come. At the outset of the site I will be publishing two monthly columns: the original Good Criticism for Bad Games series and a second called Escort Mission 64, which will delve into the awkward design evolution of early 3D platformers. There is also more in the works that I’m not ready to talk about quite yet, but suffice it to say that I wouldn’t go through the trouble of creating Super Escort Mission without plans to justify yet another game criticism site on the internet.

If you would like to get on the ground floor and help to support Super Escort Mission, you can check out my Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/scottnichols