As time marches on forward, the selection of NES games that are truly worth your time in the present age progressively starts to dwindle, with the videogame canon inevitably continuing its expansion and the list of must play classics becoming impossible to keep up with. Castlevania has been one of such NES games that has maintained its prestige and must play status throughout its entire existence, still being a joy to experience and feeling surprisingly modern despite its old age.

Using the Universal Monsters filmography as its window dressing, Castlevania juxtaposes the horror aesthetic with a vibrant color palette and catchy tunes to an oddly successful effect, and in contrast to many of the protagonists of the era, instead of controlling a nimble high jumping and sprinting character that barrels through the level regardless of how many hits he takes from incoming enemies, Castlevania puts you in charge of SImon, a strutting, stiff, clunky, and inept athlete of a hero that has you commiting to an established jump arc and getting a very "generous" knockback each time an enemy attack registers on you.

This stripping of maneuverability tied with Simon's delayed and one directional default attack is the source of Castlevania's brilliant tension between the player and the game, demanding you to take not only the enemy's movement and attack patterns into account but also yours, as to not quickly fall into a situation of inevitable disaster and get stunlocked into a corner or fall into a death pit, and to make the most out of the power-up items at your disposal to take the upper hand.

Despite some few and far between "NES hard" moments, that can easily be alleviated with some cheeseing tactics, Castlevania rarely feels dated or unfair, with the onus mostly always being on the player and his own faults and flaws, and with its unique presentation and standout game design, its no wonder it cemented itself very quickly in the videogame pantheon, providing the blueprint for better things to come, inside and outside of the franchise.

March 4th, 2020: I start a new job as software developer at a bank. 


March 6th, 2020: Boris Johnson, leader of the Conservative Party of Great Britain, reassures the British public that the rise in SARS-CoV-2 cases is "nothing to be concerned about".


March 9th, 2020:  Due to the rapid rise in SARS-CoV-2 ("coronavirus") cases in Asia and the European continent, financial markets go into free-fall. Billions of pounds of value are wiped away from companies around the world, in an event later dubbed as "The First Black Friday of 2020". My second-ever meeting at my new bank job is interrupted by financial traders screaming at each other and their phones in the corridor outside the conference room. Boris Johnson once again reassures the people of Britain that coronavirus will not be a problem in the UK.


March 10th, 2020: In the interests of personal and public safety, a number of software teams at my workplace decide to implement a joint 2-week work from home policy. An immediate evacuation of personnel, laptops and coffee mugs begins. 


March 16th, 2020: A ban on non-essential travel comes into effect in the United Kingdom and citizens are advised to stay at home to curb the spread of coronavirus. The UK government claims that coronavirus "will be beaten in 12 weeks".


March 20th, 2020: Highly-anticipated video games Animal Crossing and DOOM: Eternal release around the world. Gamers who pre-ordered DOOM Eternal also receive a remastered port of DOOM 64, a 1997 first-person shooter game developed and published by Midway Games for the Nintendo 64. This port of DOOM 64 also goes on general sale at the same time. 


March 23rd, 2020: My grandfather dies from complications related to the contraction of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‑CoV‑2).


March 26th, 2020: Due to UK government health policy that strongly encourages hospitals to release elderly patients who test positive for coronavirus into the care of residential care homes, my 60 year old mother is forced to give up her role as an events co-ordinator and take up full-time nursing duties.


April 1st, 2020: Six people are allowed to attend my grandfather's burial, which is carried out by the local council's hazardous waste department. There is no funeral ceremony. 


April 3rd, 2020: Looking for something cheap to distract me, I purchase DOOM 64 for £1.50 on the Nintendo Switch, mistakenly believing it to be a Nintendo 64 port of the original DOOM (1993). 


April 6th, 2020: While playing map 16 of DOOM 64 - "Burnt Offerings" - I begin to realise that DOOM 64 (and DOOM in general) is something quite special.

April 30th, 2020: Boris Johnson assures the public that the UK is now "past the peak" of the coronavirus pandemic.


May 2nd, 2020: Gradually beginning to enjoy the newfound freedoms of home-working, I download GZDoom and begin playing through "DOOM", "DOOM II" and their expansions whenever my code is compiling or I'm stuck waiting for a reply to an email.


May 9th, 2020: I celebrate my 30th birthday. Between other housebound festivities, I play a wee bit of DOOM II’s MAP04: The Focus to celebrate. It’s my favourite DOOM map.

June 15th, 2020: My flatmate and I host a Streets of Rage 4 charity stream on Twitch, and attempt to clear the game's Arcade Mode on Mania difficulty in one sitting. After five attempts, we manage to make it two thirds of the way through the game before throwing in the towel. The stream raises £600 for Glasgow asylum seeker funds and social housing charities.

July 23rd, 2020: Noticing my increasingly-obsessional interest in the DOOM series, my flatmate buys me a copy of Masters of DOOM, a book that tells an oral history of John Carmack and John Romero's creation of the original 1993 game and its sequel. 


July 31st, 2020: A BAFTA award for investigative journalism is awarded to the BBC for a 2019 television interview with Prince Andrew, son of Queen Elizabeth II, regarding his association with Jeffrey Epstein and alleged involvement in child sex trafficking.


August 2nd, 2020: I order a replica of John Romero's infamous "COOL GUYS AT THE BEACH" vest in anticipation of my upcoming summer holiday.


August 11th, 2020: John Romero favs a picture of me wearing my "COOL GUYS AT THE BEACH" vest.


August 21st, 2020: Twitter user @spewlieandrews makes a tweet about how he'd spend his eternity in Hell searching for Margaret Thatcher so that he could kill her again. I laugh at it and retweet it.


September 13th, 2020: Tim Rogers releases ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS DOOM, an exhaustive 3-and-a-half hour review of DOOM (1993). During his review, Tim suggests that no one can honestly claim to be a true fan of DOOM until they have tried designing their own map for the game. 


September 22nd, 2020: Some "minor" lockdown restrictions are re-introduced across the United Kingdom in response to a rapid rise in coronavirus infections and ICU admisssions. The government stops offering restaurant patrons its financial incentive programme for eating out.


September 24th, 2020: My girlfriend, a few weeks into her first year as a trainee doctor, is re-assigned to a new infectious diseases unit created in response to a severe rise in coronavirus cases across the city of Glasgow.


September 26th, 2020: I receive a stern warning from my employer's infosec administrator for attempting to install WINE and Ultimate Doom Builder on my workplace laptop. I promise not to do it again and remain grateful that he didn't see the GZDoom launcher on my desktop while inspecting the laptop.


September 27th, 2020: After successfully reformatting my old 2007 Lenovo laptop and installing Windows 10 on it, I begin the process of making a DOOM map. 


September 29th, 2020: After a few evenings spent learning how to make working doors and windows, I create a file called MY-COOL-MAP-01.wad and decide to make a standard DOOM (1993) techbase to test if I understand what the DOOM experts on YouTube have taught me so far.


September 30th, 2020: To make the learning process funny (which is very important to me), I decide to use @spewlieandrews’s August 21st, 2020 tweet about fighting through Hell to find Thatcher as a model for MY-COOL-MAP-01.wad. Making a techbase map about Margaret Thatcher naturally leads to MY-COOL-MAP-01.wad becoming THATCHERS-TECHBASE.wad later that day. 


October 8th, 2020: While in a pub on Islay, my girlfriend and I find out that the Scottish Government is restricting hospitality opening times to 6am-6pm indoors. The sale of alcohol will not be permitted at any time. News of this announcement causes the entire pub to descend into Tennent's-fuelled chaos. After securing my final pint, I go back to drawing DOOM map layouts on my phone.  


October 21st, 2020: Construction begins on THATCHER’S BATTLE COLISEUM, one of the game’s main boss arenas. At this point in development, I still don’t know what a Margaret Thatcher-based boss battle in the idTech1 engine would look like.


October 27th, 2020: Struggling with mapper’s block, I decide to recreate the main lobby of Peach’s Castle from Super Mario 64 in DOOM. With a bit of texture-bashing, this later becomes one of the game’s main lobbies. The iconic castle corridor where Peach’s portrait morphs into Bowser’s - one of my most precious gaming memories ever - is easily repurposed into a Thatcher joke.

October 31st, 2020: Submitting to widespread pressure from the media, general public and his own government officials, Boris Johnson finally announces a second coronavirus lockdown in order to prevent "a medical and moral disaster".


November 1st, 2020: I finish playing through Going Down - perhaps the greatest DOOM wad of all time - and am reassured to discover that DOOM is a fantastic vehicle for comedy.


November 4th, 2020: My flatmate buys me a copy of Tricks of the DOOM Programming Gurus,  a 1995 book about DOOM mapping. The book comes with a CD-ROM that has a few hundred wads on it, but after 26 years on a bookshelf, the glue has fused the CD’s envelope shut and  I can’t get it open. 


November 5th, 2020: While reading Tricks of the DOOM Programming Gurus, I come across a chapter that describes “The Best DOOM WADs Ever”. Among mods dedicated to The Simpsons and Beavis & Butthead, I find an entry for a wad called Return to Phobos. The author of Tricks of the DOOM Programming Gurus describes the wad’s E1M4 replacement as “one of the all-time great DOOM maps”. I’ve never heard of it.


November 6th, 2020: Still curious about Return to Phobos and unable to get the glue off my CD-ROM, I spend some time searching the internet for the wad file. After downloading and playing two other DOOM wads called Return to Phobos that aren’t the particular 1995 Return to Phobos wad that I was looking for, I eventually locate the all-time great E1M4 replacement. It’s a giant factory with a balcony at the rear that lets you look out at a stunning 128x128 industrial skybox. I like it. Some of the doors don’t work and the textures are out of alignment, but I like it. 


November 7th, 2020: E1M4 of Return to Phobos is resurrected and thoroughly repurposed as a mining facility for THATCHER’S TECHBASE. While retexturing a big slime pit, I find out Joe Biden has been elected president of the United States. I return to retexturing my slime pit.


December 14th, 2020: I submit a fake article to my friend’s zine in the style of a 90s video games magazine article. To fill the page out, I stick some wigs on cyberdemon, imp and pinkie sprites to make them look like infamous politicians. The image of a cyberdemon rocking Thatcher’s iconic blow-dry job really makes me laugh.

December 19th, 2020: Due to a rapid rise in coronavirus infections and critical demand on healthcare services, the British and Scottish governments announce a ban on household mixing over the Christmas period. "Tier four" lockdown restrictions now apply indefinitely.

December 25th, 2020: I have an instant curry with my brother and girlfriend before they head off to work on emergency infectious diseases wards at the local hospital because people are being ventilated in corridors and are having to sleep on beds placed in storage rooms. I watch Home Alone 2 then do a bit of work on THATCHER'S TECHBASE.

January 1st, 2021: Waking up to an empty house again, I decide to spend my first hours of the first day of 2021 fucking about with THATCHER'S TECHBASE again. I am severely hung over and vomit into the bin next to my computer within minutes of trying to play the big lobby fight. Maybe tomorrow.

January 22nd, 2021: With the majority of the map's layout, scripting and enemy placement done, I decide to take a short sabbatical from map-making to do some research on the Margaret Thatcher premiership period, which lasted from 1979 - 1990. I watch a number of documentaries, fiction films andYouTube videos that are related, directly or indirectly, to the Thatcher government and its influence on British society in the 1980s. Examples include Pride, The Fully Monty, Brassed Off, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover and Pink Floyd's The Wall.

February 17th, 2021: After spending a lot of time reading very snobby, snooty and sanctimonious guides on how to do pixel art for DOOM, I begin adding my points of reference to the game as in-game textures and sprites. I find the pipeline of identifying images, tailoring them to the specifications of the DOOM engine and adding my own artistic flourishes to be one of the most satisfying parts of the THATCHER'S TECHBASE design process so far.


March 16th, 2021: Prince Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, is photographed leaving hospital following a heart transplant at age 99. His incredibly sullen features and sickly demeanour prompt a number of internet memes and satirical artworks that I enjoy very much.


March 19th, 2021: While watching a decino video about the inner workings of the DOOM engine, I learn that Commander Keen objects (as seen in DOOM II’s MAP32) have a special property that causes them to open doors tagged “666” on a map when they are shot at. 


March 21st, 2021: While doing a biweekly watch of my favourite One Piece scenes, I realise that the Commander Keen object in DOOM could be repurposed to resemble a shootable flag. I animate a burning Union Jack sprite and replace the Keen frames with it.


March 24th, 2021: New guidance mandates that all government buildings in the United Kingdom will fly the Union flag at all times. 


April 4th, 2021: Buckingham Palace announces that Prince Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, has died at the age of 99. 


April 6th, 2021: After a number of unsuccessful attempts to convincingly put a Thatcher wig on a Cyberdemon, I decide to ask someone with actual talent to do it for me and commission a pixel artist from Brazil. When he asks me to do a sketch explaining what the hell I’m talking about, I realise it would also be pretty funny to give her a ripped jacket and handbag. https://ibb.co/HpLpkFP


April 7th, 2021: After a nervous 24 hour wait spent wondering if I am certifiably insane, I receive an enthusiastic reply from the artist, who agrees to create the necessary sprites for a Cyberdemon sprite replacement. The enemy has now been creatively dubbed “CyberThatcher”.


April 10th, 2021: CyberThatcher’s handbag is dropped due to logistical issues.

April 12th, 2021: Non-essential retail reopens in England and Wales.


April 17th, 2021: The CyberThatcher sprite sheet is completed and inserted into the game.

April 20th, 2021: I get a haircut for the first time in over a year.

April 26th, 2021: A leaked recording from inside 10 Downing Street reveals that in the autumn of 2020, Boris Johnson said that he would rather "let bodies pile high in their thousands" than take the country into another coronavirus lockdown. Once again, I feel regret that I don't have the time or resources available to put a Boris Johnson wig on that pinkie sprite.


May 12th, 2021: After four months spent playing my wad while listening to a MIDI version of LMAO’s Party Rock Anthem on repeat, I decide that the main map of THATCHER’S TECHBASE probably deserves a more fitting soundtrack. I contact my friend Barry Topping with a tongue-in-cheek job offer, suggesting he compose a “man on a mission”-styled metal track in the vein of the original DOOM games. As an avowed metalhead, he graciously accepts the offer of a lifetime. 


May 13th, 2021: Barry sends me “thatcher1.mp3”, an awesome minute-long sample of the song he’s written. Much to Barry’s dismay, I inform him that the map takes between 40 minutes and an hour to beat in its present state. I have inadvertently tasked him with the horrendous job of coming up with a tune that someone would be happy to listen to upwards of 60 times in a row.


May 16th, 2021: Barry sends me “thatcher2.mp3”, an incredible six-minute long sample of the song he’s written. Much to my delight, the song is now 6 minutes long and could comfortably be listened to on repeat upwards of 120 times in a row. In honour of our new-found creative partnership and a long-standing ironic catchphrase related to the failures of the 2014 Scottish Referendum on Independence, the track is dubbed "L2VN" - "Love 2 Vote No".

June 16th, 2021: After seeing more of THATCHER'S TECHBASE, Barry very kindly offers to compose more music for the game.

June 18th, 2021: Barry produces the opening theme of THATCHER'S TECHBASE, to be used with the main menu.

June 21st, 2021: All coronavirus restrictions are lifted across the United Kingdom.

June 25th, 2021: I build a quick test area in THATCHER'S TECHBASE in order to work on some new Doomcute objects. While bashing together a few chairs, cigarettes and cans of Tennent's Lager, I realise that the test area is actually pretty fun to hang out in and decide to keep it in.


June 26th, 2021: After a few hours spent quickly map-bashing some assets from iconic 90s DOOM wad STAR WARS DOOM 2, I turn my quick test area into a UAC headquarters building and move everything out into a new MAP01 slot in the wad. This map becomes The Beginning of THATCHER'S TECHBASE.

June 28th, 2021: THATCHER’S TECHBASE is awarded an E3 best of THIS 2021 Award by MechaGamezilla.

July 8th, 2021: I share a pre-release build of THATCHER'S TECHBASE with some DOOM wad enthusiasts.

July 9th, 2021: A DOOM player and wadding/modding enthusiast with 25 years of experience laments that I didn't share THATCHER'S TECHBASE sooner - not because it's amazing, but because it's gotten wildly out of hand and he thinks it needs to get under control. He shares some very harsh but fair advice with me.

July 10th, 2021: I cut a number of sections from THATCHER'S TECHBASE in the interests of not making players go mad with confusion/stress/boredom. Approximately 2,500 sectors are deleted in one hour. With far less map to maintain, I feel much better about the project.

July 11th, 2021: An amateur DOOM player struggles to realise that a wall in front of them at the start of MAP02 is a door. I start to feel much worse about the project and wonder if anyone will be able to understand me. I begin to fear that if THATCHER'S TECHBASE was a £60 game you could buy in a shop, people would be looking for their receipts in the first ten minutes.

July 22nd, 2021: While watching footage of The Beginning, Barry notices similarities between the wad's Express Elevator to Hell and the opening of Paradise Killer. WHITEHELL, MAP01's track, is extended to include one of his signature funky interludes.

August 4th, 2021: In the middle of a rare Scottish heatwave, I play through some of Flower, Sun and Rain's most infamously obtuse and player-adversarial chapters and begin to understand the value in placing priority on my own game world over the game world that a player might expect.

August 20th, 2021: I play through the infamous toilet maze puzzle in Grasshopper Manufacture’s The 25th Ward: The Silver Case. After months of feeling guilty about forcing potential THATCHER’S TECHBASE players through harshly indistinct mazes, I suddenly feel much better about myself and the game and begin to see the humour in making gamers suffer.

August 23rd, 2021: Realising that I could probably spend months (if not years) refining the map to no end, I decide to do the one thing I never wanted to do since the moment the project began - I set myself an arbitrary deadline of September 24th, 2021 for the release of THATCHER'S TECHBASE and decide to get the wad into a playable state by that date.

August 25th, 2021: Realising that the content of THATCHER'S TECHBASE makes it an unlikely candidate for inclusion in the idgames wad archive, I make a website to host the wad instead. Inspired by my prior success raising money for charity with Streets of Rage 4, I include a donations link for organisations suggested by Hope Not Hate, a group set up in the wake of Margaret Thatcher's death to encourage people to support communities affected by the decisions of her government.

August 28th, 2021: Hoping I can find a way for the game to played by more people than just by immediate friends and appreciator's of Barry "Epoch" Topping's music, I enlist my friend Richie Morgan to make a tongue-in-cheek trailer for the game to help get the word out.

September 1st, 2021: The trailer for THATCHER'S TECHBASE is completed, but I feel like it's missing something - namely, the voice of Margaret Thatcher herself. I approach a guy on Twitter who is really good at imitating Duke Nukem and Dr. Kleiner from Half-Life and ask him if he knows anyone who could do a good Thatcher impersonation.

September 2nd, 2021: Gianni, the Duke in question, responds quickly and recommends Laila Berzins - the voice of Demeter in Hades and a bunch of anime boys in Sword Art Online. Despite my reservations about how much a professional voice actor would cost, Gianni strongly recommends that I ask her anyway. In the space of an hour, Laila sends me six voice lines and waives the majority of her fee upon learning that it's a free game about killing Margaret Thatcher that intends to raise money for charity.

September 13th, 2021: I get a cat.

September 14th, 2021: After being condemned by the UK's chief medical officer for spreading coronavirus misinformation, Nicki Minaj releases a Twitter voice note that claims she was an Oxford classmate of the late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.

September 15th, 2021: The THATCHER’S TECHBASE trailer launches. In its first day on Twitter, it somehow gets 3000 retweets and 8000 favourites. A lot of gaming websites turn the tweet thread about the trailer into low-effort content for their blogs. People with small brains send me a fair few messages with insinuations of sacrilege, treason and other acts of digital terrorism. I am generally shitting myself.


September 16th, 2021: Articles about THATCHER’S TECHBASE are published in The Independent and NME. A pal from 15 years ago phones me up to tell me how excited he is to play the game. John Romero retweets a Rock Paper Shotgun article about the game and declares that he's going to play the wad. I am now really shitting myself.

September 19th, 2021: Gillian Anderson wins an Emmy Award for her portrayal of the late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. After the awards show, Anderson is asked if she consulted the Iron Lady about the role. She claims she has not spoken to Margaret Thatcher recently.

September 20th, 2021: UK bottling plants and farm suppliers report that there is only enough C02 supply to last the nation "one or two more weeks" - this prompts mass panic buying of Coca-Cola, Irn Bru and other carbonated drinks. The price of Irn Bru immediately rises by £1.50, and multipacks are auctioned on eBay.

September 23rd, 2021: Shortages of diesel and petrol are reported across the United Kingdom, prompting a wave of panic buying nation-wide. Ambulances at the hospital my girlfriend works at are forced to suspend service, as local petrol stations have been selling their emergency reserve supplies to desperate bidders.

September 24th, 2021: About an hour before I am due to publish THATCHER'S TECHBASE on the web, my daily post arrives. A firm of lawyers representing Tennent's Lager order me to remove any copyrighted branding and images related to Tennent's Lager from THATCHER'S TECHBASE - in exchange, Tennent's Lager will make charitable donations to the organisations suggested by 3D: Doom Daddy Digital's website. I comply, replacing the T cans with legally-distinct F cans with only 30 minutes to spare.

At 12pm BST, THATCHER'S TECHBASE is released to the public.


------------------------------------

Still with me? Great. Thank you.

So - that's how I got here. As you can see above, THATCHER'S TECHBASE is a piss-take the just kept gaining more and more piss-taking momentum until it reached a critical mass of taken piss. A silly distraction in a hopeless situation that was ultimately powered by the twin engines of my love of a good joke and my hatred for the Conservative and Unionist Party of the United Kingdom, birthed to a Global Britain that is imploding ever-inward.

When I first opened Ultimate Doom Builder on September 27th, 2020, I never intended for my finished product to become something that would have me taking interviews from magazines and newspapers. I never imagined that folk from Brazil and Argentina would message me about how much they loved the design of The Icon of Thatcher. I couldn't possibly conceive of Scotland's most beloved lager company giving their money to social justice causes so that they didn't have to be associated with my work. I just wanted to have a good time making a game and let others have a good time playing a game. Fortunately, I think I still managed to achieve that too.

A week out from release, it does feel like THATCHER'S TECHBASE was yet another victim of the classic video game hype pathology that we've all known about since the first time Nintendo Official Magazine promised us Dinosaur Planet was going to revolutionise the games industry as we knew it forever. When the trailer dropped, people were proclaiming it Game of the Year, Game of the Decade, Game of the Century - and in a way, it kinda hurt to see people pin their Thatcher-bashing hopes on something that only I seemed to know was an amateur production. I knew people were probably joking, but I also knew people were probably going to be let down by THATCHER'S TECHBASE - and there was no realistic means of telling them that without sounding like a moron or a fraud.

After a chaotic launch day filled with technical hitches and streamers angrily messaging me with disapproval over the game's more "extreme" content, I've shied away from reading too much opinion on the wad. Some people get it; some people really don't. While Barry, Richie and my other friends did their best to elevate THATCHER'S TECHBASE into something spectacular, it is still ultimately a quick and dirty little amateur DOOM wad with some Margaret Thatcher paint coating its non-orthogonal walls. Is that sort of thing really worth writing about in a newspaper? Is that sort of thing really worth streaming to your audience of thousands? Is that sort of thing really worth five stars on Backloggd? Or even four stars? Debatable! But it's my work, and I'm proud of it. If I don't give it five stars, how could I expect anyone else to? THATCHER'S TECHBASE is what it is, and aside from a few more minor tweaks and improvements I plan to make in the near future, I guess people will just have to deal with that. (Lemme tell ya - I never imagined someone would DM me to complain that the Thatcher's Grave section wasn't "optimised for co-op play" lmao)

In many ways, I'm relieved that my criticisms of THATCHER'S TECHBASE are other people's criticisms of THATCHER'S TECHBASE, too. I haven't yet been blindsided by any huge oversights in design or presentation, which was a perpetual worry while creating the wad. Aside from occasional DOOM-building tutorials and design guides, I tried to make as much of THATCHER'S TECHBASE as I could by myself - pretentious or not, I wanted it to be my work, my ideas, my thoughts, my feelings, untainted by outsiders as much as possible - something inside me just told me that this had to be my vision of Hell. Arguably a very naive decision, but I was worried that opening the game up to too much of the internet's collective-constructive consciousness early on in the process would derail me from the goals that were formed in my mind from day one. I wanted THATCHER'S TECHBASE to be fun to play and nice to look at, but ultimately the project was a therapeutic outlet for me in an era where everything outside of DOOM's space brought so much pain and anger... Something about Margaret Thatcher and DOOM just felt like such a natural fit in every single way. The overlap in time period, the rage, the pain, the suffering, the helplessness, the despair, the manic, desperate energy of it all - at no point in the process did I doubt that Thatcher deserved to be the subject of her own DOOM wad. It's more that the technical process of creating said wad was a huge hurdle for a first-time wadder to clear.

Obviously, my introverted development process backfired in many ways - as we read in the July 9th, 2021 entry of the THATCHER'S TECHBASE: OFFICIAL TIMELINE, I found out way too late in the development process that I'd made something over-complex and under-designed, a map drawn on a pub napkin that was crushing itself under technical and practical weights that I didn't even know existed for a long time because I was only talking to myself about it. I let my mind run wild while my body was stuck in the same physical space for months on end, and it didn't always lead to great things. Would people enjoy THATCHER'S TECHBASE more if it was shorter, more direct? If the puzzles weren't so fucking esoteric? If I'd leaned the dial of difficulty closer to the original DOOM than The Plutonia Experiment? Probably! The wad's Hurt Me Plenty difficulty was designed to be enjoyed by people who've played their fair share of classic DOOM, but I don't think I ever considered that a) the wad would find a fanbase beyond hardcore gamers or b) that most DOOM source ports automatically drop their cursor on that pseudo-Hard difficulty at load time. I've seen more than one streamer ram their head against the first two sections of THATCHER'S TECHBASE and then throw in the towel when they really didn't need to - I'm Too Young To Die and Not Too Rough difficulty are probably the right difficulty levels for most people - but given the technical limitations of the original DOOM, it's nigh-on impossible to communicate that to people that not all hope is lost; that they can still make it to the juicy CyberThatcher MK1/MK2 content if they just dial back difficulty a little. But by the same token - shouldn't a game about otherthrowing Margaret Thatcher and the systems of decaying power she represents be difficult? Like, really fucking difficult? Did you really think you could waltz into a British Hell and sort things out in an afternoon? C'mon now. The longer THATCHER'S TECHBASE exists in the ether, the less of an issue the challenges of the game should become, hopefully. I've yet to hear about anyone beating it on AUSTERITY difficulty, though, and in a weird, perverse way, that kinda makes me happy. It's not remotely fair!

One thing that has been validating about the game, in a weird way, is that the two "puzzles" I put the most time into - the "Three Thatchers" lobby and the desecration of Union Jack flag - are the two things that have provoked the most remarks, questions and frustrations. While I'm not going to wash my hands of any criticisms those parts of the game have provoked, they really were meant to tease and terrorise you until you arrived at the same conclusions I did while making the wad - that images of Margaret Thatcher and the United Kingdom have to be destroyed with a double-barrelled shotgun if you want to break free and move forward.

When you make a point of intentionally creating something in a vacuum, there can be an overbearing sense of dread regarding everyone else who's standing inside the airlock - will this silly little puzzle make sense to them? Is this fight too hard if you don't know where the health packs are? Is this bit of artwork going too far into a realm that should stay inside me? Will people be annoyed by this? All of this? That was probably the scariest thing about making something like THATCHER'S TECHBASE. Every time I approached an outsider about a sprite, a sound effect or a voice line, I expected nothing but disgust, despair or abject laughter. Maybe even a referral to a psychiatric unit. But not once did I receive anything but the greatest of care from others. Every request was met with kindness - much more kind than it deserved. People seemed more than willing to help me. And that felt fucking great.

I made THATCHER'S TECHBASE more or less by myself in a physical and mental isolation, but THATCHER'S TECHBASE wouldn't exist without everyone else. Everyone who suffered directly as a consequence of Margret Thatcher's decisions as a politician, everyone who stood up and was counted by her, everyone who tried to take count of her in kind; everyone who worked on the original DOOM games, everyone who contributed to DOOM's legacy in some way, everyone who played DOOM at some point in their life; everyone who said that the wad was a good idea, everyone who gave me a stupid idea to throw into the game, everyone who wrote a song for it, everyone who recorded a voice line for it, everyone who drew a picture of a Cyberdemon in a pearl necklace; every single person helped create this stupid little DOOM wad in their own way - and I'm really glad that they did. Because it wouldn't be anything without them.

This game is dedicated to everyone Margaret Thatcher and everyone who hated Margaret Thatcher.

I had never played an MMO before this one, and I had always felt bad about my lack of exposure to the genre, since I’m someone who’s tried to experience the breadth of what gaming has to offer. The MMO experience is one that has drawn in millions and millions of people over the course of decades, with the most popular games becoming cultural landmarks, so it was a pretty glaring omission, and I was waiting for a perfect opportunity to jump in. Luckily, I had a friend who was one of the “XIV free trial up to the award-winning expansion Heavensward” cultists, and having seen the amazing positive reception of Shadowbringers, I began under his tutelage. This review is just a rough journal of my time in each major release of the game, which at the time of writing, excludes Endwalker. If I end up playing that, I’ll write a review on its own page.

I warn you right now, though: this is the most pointless review I’ll ever write.

A Realm Reborn
I had always heard that the FFXIV community was friendly to newcomers, but to my surprise, there was hardly a community at all. Not in the sense that no one was on the server, but in that I didn’t see anyone speaking to each other. The vision of an MMO hub that I had in my head was that of a bustling marketplace, people trying to get you to buy stuff, join their organization, scam you, any number of things. Instead, I was greeted by a giant cluster of Organization Thirteen lookalikes and catgirls silently standing in a circle around a giant crystal. I did my little starter quests in silence, occasionally intersecting with another newcomer who was doing the same thing, never speaking, just getting through the content as fast as possible. I attempted to follow the story of these quests, but so many were the sort of fetching and “prove yourself by killing a monster” quests that I tuned out of the story entirely. The friend who was serving as my guide agreed that this was the best way to play, at least until you started reaching the back end of the 2.0 content. So, for about forty hours, all I did was mindlessly run from one point to the next, not talking, no story to enjoy, and not enough abilities to have interesting gameplay in the dungeons along the way. It wasn’t exactly painful, the novelty of seeing all the different areas was nice, but these first forty hours were pretty evenly bland for me. However, committed to the task at hand, I pushed forward to Heavensward.

Heavensward
In terms of story and characters, this expansion ended up being my favorite, but it was also when I began to have problems with the learning curve. Specifically, the fact that the game doesn’t provide you with one, in a manner of speaking. You’re put through filler quests for a hundred hours, then into a dungeon with unique boss mechanics you’ve never been exposed to. If players are forced through the main story before they can queue for these dungeons, why do the quests not take the opportunity to teach mechanics? Veteran players swap memes about how terrible sprouts are for not understanding these things, but how in the world could they? Is the best path really to ask players to go look up a guide before even starting the dungeon, ruining any excitement for themselves? As you can probably guess, the raids and high level dungeons of Heavensward were the first time I received player communication of any type, which was usually of the “learn to play” variety. The problem with such statements is that the implication is that I should have already learned to play, not that I should continue the active process of doing so. As I shirked aggro to these players to provide them some downtime with which to consider this paradox, I thought about how there really isn’t a perfect solution to the problem. Some bosses are so intricate that loading up dungeons with simplified versions of individual mechanics isn’t a tenable solution, since the content is designed to work well in repetition. Having to replay a tutorial even once when playing a game in NG+ can be a drag, so redoing mini-tutorials hundreds of times could be terrible unless executed flawlessly. Even so, there are a lot more fundamentals that could have been included in the normal questline that would have helped immensely. Later expansions would go on to have enemies that use gaze effects and rotating zones of damage in the same way bosses do, but it was too little too late. The only reason I was able to make it through all the early content was because I had someone to explain all this stuff to me directly, and I can’t imagine the flaming I would have received otherwise. I may have even stopped playing the game altogether, which leads into...

Stormblood
This is where people thought I would stop playing the game altogether. The story of this expansion is pretty bad, with the focus falling on characters who are fairly uninteresting, namely Lyse, Fordola, Yotsuyu, and Zenos. The graphics engine may give these characters three dimensions, but the writing certainly doesn’t, and they stay stagnant and boring throughout the entire expansion. Splitting the action between two hubs was also a questionable move, with Ala Mhigo feeling boring and underdeveloped compared to the obvious love that went into Kugane. I wish there was more I had to say about this expansion or its gameplay, but it just felt like A Realm Reborn 2. Bland story content, running from place to place doing stuff I didn’t care much about, a drawn-out introduction to the much more interesting followup.

Shadowbringers
The way this expansion had been praised, you would think it was the best Final Fantasy game to release in the last decade, and I’ve seen it literally described as such fairly often. Some parts were pretty enchanting, and the characters received a notable improvement in their writing. I’m not sure how much I’ll remember of this expansion’s plot in the future, but my crush on Urianger will last forever, and I think that speaks to the quality of the characterization compared to Stormblood. The start of the DLC in particular grips you with one horrific moment that comes out of left field, so from that moment onward, I was totally invested in the story. The problem is, as good as the story is for an MMO, stretching it out over so many hours, over so many basic and mindless quests, the pace flows like a river of bricks. It was like watching a great movie for fifteen minutes, leaving to mow the lawn, watching another fifteen, then getting up and doing the dishes, over and over until the movie was over. It’s not that it makes the story itself bad, but the format is so clunky that it’s hard to stay involved.

Postgame
...otherwise known as “the game”. This is when I started doing the raids and trials I had missed during my run through the main quest. Even though it’s something that should have dawned on me earlier in this process, the same way it’s already dawned on everyone reading, this is when I started to realize that I might be closed off from MMO experience. Even though I was doing these raids, getting better stuff, and chatting with my friend while doing so, I just… didn’t care. I didn’t care about getting better so the parser-users would think I’m the best, I didn’t care about gear when it would be inevitably obsoleted by a future expansion, the appeal of the story was over, there wasn’t any content left for me. Even with thousands of hours of things to do, raid tiers and trials as far as the eye can see, I just did not care. The bosses weren’t as fun as the ones in my single-player action games, there wasn’t the expressiveness of a traditional RPG, I was always left thinking “I could be having more fun right now”. It’s emblematic of the way I approach games, where I’m looking for something focused and direct, not a game that I can get lost in, not a forum for enjoying time with a community or working with a team to get to the top. My goal may have been to get a taste of what it’s like to be into an MMO, but after hundreds of hours spent in the game, the only realization to be had was that there’s a lot more to that experience than just playing the game. You have to find people you like, you have to enjoy the lengthy journey, you have to find some heart in the game that lets you call it home. Even though I had decided to commit my time and energy, I couldn’t just decide to love it.

Post game
After spending all that time with XIV, focusing on it exclusively for a couple months, I was expecting it to heavily occupy my thoughts after stopping. I expected to sit down at my computer and think of something to do, only to feel the pang of wanting to go back to Eorzea. However, this ended up not being the case, and it slipped out of my mind to a degree where I had to google that name just now because I had forgotten it. Honestly, had I not developed such a crush on Urianger, I doubt I would have thought about the game afterwards at all. When the Endwalker trailer dropped, I was expecting another rush of wanting to go back to that world, but… nothing. I’m vaguely interested in it because I dumped so much time into this story already, but I could just as easily read a summary and be happy with it. To tell the truth, I’m a bit sad about how this whole MMO experiment went. I was hoping to open my eyes to a whole new style of game, to maybe find a nice, escapist home I could always go back to, but instead all I got was a reminder of how limiting taste and preference can be.

So, that’s what brings me back to the pointlessness. I played a game for hundreds of hours, and all I can say is “I didn’t like it because I don’t like MMO’s, and that’s fine because everyone has different taste”. At least I warned you, but thanks for reading all of this. I had to get it off my chest after wasting so much of my friend’s time, who explained things to me so patiently. Cherish your friends, everyone.

This is a very long explanation of why I’m not the most enthusiastic person about Majora’s Mask. TL;DR I agree with people’s opinions that the characters, side quest and world of Termina are fantastic; however, as a Zelda game, I think it leaves a lot to be desired and I don’t think its strong elements are enough to make up for that.
If you’re interested in my opinions, I would love to have a discussion about this game, since I feel like I’m the only one who isn’t ecstatic about it and want to know what others think of my takes.



I feel like I have more to say about Majora’s Mask than I do about any other game I’ve ever played. I didn’t hate this game, but I far from loved it. My perception of it is all over the place, and it especially sucks that I seem to be the only person who doesn’t like it. Sure, I’ve heard plenty of people say that they couldn’t get into it, or maybe there are some out there who were overwhelmed by it for various reasons, but this was my first time playing this game and I 100% it, and even still I don’t agree with the unbelievable amount of praise this game has received. That being said I still think I understand why other people love it so much, and if I’m correct in my assumption, then the things people love about this game are unquestionably the best parts about it. That “thing” being, again the world of Termina itself.

It’s easy to separate this game into two parts: the Zelda game part, and the side quest part. Personally, I really don’t like the Zelda game part. With one exception, I didn’t like any of the temples or the stories that were told in these areas.

Woodfall is ok; it’s inoffensive, the conflict that happens here is serviceable, and the temple is really simple but it’s not bad.

Snowfall is one of the biggest “mehs” in a Zelda game for me; the whole plot is about stopping a baby from crying (so it’s not exactly the most engaging conflict) and there was too much backtracking in the temple for my liking. I was constantly confused about how to progress or where I needed to be, so I ended up running back and forth through the dungeon and not having the best time. I blocked this whole area out of my memory and don’t remember very much about it.

I DO, however, remember the Great Bay. I had absolutely zero fun in this area. Zora swimming is cool I guess, but this place is so big and empty, the Pirate’s fortress and retrieving all of the eggs is so tedious, and it takes an eternity to finally get to the temple. I think it took me three hours from entering it to getting to the dungeon. And the dungeon itself is pretty lame too. It’s better than the first two because it has an interesting gimmick unlike Woodfall temple, and it isn’t confusing to navigate like Snowhead temple, but it doesn’t really have much going for it. It takes a long time to complete, has the worst boss in the game, and its mechanics weren’t fun to solve or execute. I might have found the story here more interesting if I didn’t absolutely hate everything else about it.

Ikana Canyon is the best area by far. It has the most interesting story and the most compelling characters in my opinon. What happens with the little girl and her dad is the most moving and beautiful thing in the entire game, and the area as a whole has an air of regret and decay that is unrelenting. The dungeon is also the best in the game because it effectively uses all of your tools and has a neat gimmick where you flip the entire dungeon upside down and have to explore it on the floor and the ceiling. Unfortunately, while this dungeon has the highest highs, it also has the lowest lows.

Just getting to this place is a nightmare; playing the elegy of emptiness dozens of times, unnecessary micromanaging of your inventory, and having to repeat it whenever you want to switch the temple upside down. It’s padding and tedious. I also had a rough time playing this dungeon in particular; when I got through the dungeon, I was on the night of the final day, and when I fought the boss for the first time, I used up all of my magic and couldn’t use the giant’s mask anymore. I was a bit confused on how the fight worked to begin with, magic drops would despawn before I could pick them up, and trying to hit them with arrows as regular link was practically impossible; essentially, the fight was unwinnable with my current knowledge and arsenal.

So, I decided to use the ocarina to head back to clock town and get some Chateau Romani to get infinite magic. Unfortunately, since I was on the night of the final day, I had to reset the cycle. You wouldn’t think that would be so bad since I’d already finished the dungeon and so I could go straight to the boss. I thought the same thing, but unbeknownst to me, when the cycle reset, so do chests and small keys. I had to play through the entire dungeon again, trying in vain to remember how to spawn the chest I needed to hookshot to and where the small keys were (some small keys didn’t even respawn and just gave rupies instead, forcing me to waste even more time trying to find the specific keys the game respawned). Over an hour went by before I finally had reopened the path to fight a boss I already didn’t enjoy fighting. I realize that this is a very specific instance, and perhaps I shouldn’t use this example to speak on the game’s objective quality. But I hope you understand how frustrating it was for me to go through, why it left a bad taste in my mouth, and why it negatively impressed my opinion on this dungeon, this area, and the game as a whole.

Aside from the areas and dungeons, I have two larger, more general complaints with the Zelda side of the game that were present throughout my playthrough.

My first issue is with the controls. I should specify that I played this game through the Wii virtual console with a GameCube controller, so it’s possible that these complaints are due to my control method and not the game itself. One issue is the fact that the N64 buttons are mapped to the GameCube c-stick. Needless to say, trying to replicate button presses by assigning them to an analog stick isn’t ideal, and I constantly had misinputs whenever I was trying to use an item or play the ocarina. What I didn’t know until my last few hours of playing is that they’re also mapped to the x, y, and z buttons. While this helps dramatically with item usage, it’s even more cumbersome to play the ocarina this way imo, the up button is still only mapped to the c-stick (as far as I’m aware at least), and the fact that it isn’t labelled as their respective buttons creates a disconnect between my muscle memory and what my eyes tell me (which isn’t the games fault, obviously, but with using the GameCube controller on the N64 rom).

Another issue is with item management. With the wide array of standard Zelda items as well as a couple dozen masks to sort through, going through your menu will happen more often in this game than it will in most other Zelda games save for Link’s Awakening, or at the very least it feels that way because of how slow it is. I really don’t know why the three transformation masks and the ocarina of time couldn’t have been mapped to the d-pad. All the d-pad does in this game is function identically to the b button when you’re in the bomber’s notebook (weirdly specific, I know). I realize this might be an awkward move for your hand to make considering the d-pad and the analog stick weren’t easily accessible together on the N64 controller, but this method would still be faster than sorting through menus manually and essentially give you 7 item slots for quick access; on top of that, you’ll rarely have to switch between transformation masks or use the ocarina in tense situations, so it’s not like it moving your hand over would put you in a disadvantageous spot in a boss fight or something like that.

My last control issue is that the inputs aren’t very snappy or precise. I’m not sure if this is because there’s some input lag, or if it was a programming limitation on the N64, or if it’s a GameCube controller issue, or something else entirely, but I’ll try to explain what I mean. The two specific actions this is an issue for it is bomb throwing and camera resetting. With bomb throwing, you can’t simply hold forward and immediately throw the bomb like you can in most other Zelda games; trying to do it that fast will just have Link set it down in front of him like a dumbass and blow himself up. He has to have a running start in order to throw it in front of him. This led to me failing the bomb minigames multiple times.

The camera reset is a bit harder to explain. If Link faces directly at the camera and you hit the L button to reset it behind him so that the camera turns completely around, but then immediately hold forward after the camera has finished moving, Link will do a complete 360 and keep walking in the direction he was originally facing. In order for the camera to stay set behind him, you half to wait about a half-second and then hold forward so that it doesn’t spas out. I’m sorry if I’m doing a bad job of explaining exactly what this is like, but it’s similar to Mario’s turnaround controls in Mario 64, where you have to wait a half second for Mario to make a complete stop before turning around, otherwise he’ll turn in a semicircle and fall off of platforms. The point is, I had trouble with the camera in this game, and while it didn’t cause me to take unnecessary damage or lose progress, it led to a lot of waiting if I wanted to simply turn around as well as making locking on to bosses harder than it needed to be, and this is something I had to deal with for the entire game.

My second larger, general complaint is with the puzzles in this game. Puzzle solving in this game can be very cryptic, and very often has at most two but usually one solution to problems; I noticed this most in Snowhead temple, the two skulltula houses, and a few places on the overworld. I’ll try to keep this part brief because I understand that this is an issue that is present in pretty much every Zelda game prior to A Link Between Worlds, but this is the game where it got on my nerves the most, and I wanted to give a few specific examples.

In Snowhead temple, your progress to multiple rooms is blocked with icebergs covering doors that you need to fire arrows to melt. There were some torches next the icebergs in the central room, so I tried shooting an arrow through them in order to melt the icebergs; the game had previously confirmed that using arrows to transport fire from one place to another is something that the game is capable of doing, since you had to figure out how to do that to clear poison from the water in the Woodfall temple. My friend also swore that he had done this exact thing and it worked for him, but we tried it dozens of times from multiple different angles and it never worked. I also tried punching the icebergs with Goron link, because the game had previously confirmed in another room within the same temple that Goron link could punch through ice enemies that would normally freeze you if you touched them, as well as the fact that Goron link could break through snow boulders outside the temple by punching them, but those didn’t work either. I had to get the fire arrows from somewhere else in the temple and then come back and melt them with those because the game only allowed for one specific answer to the puzzle.

Another example is in the skulltula house in woodfall. There’s a room where some skulltulas are hiding inside large pots and another where they’re in a tree that you can’t get on top of. In both cases, in order to reach them, you have to either roll into them with regular link or punch them with Goron Link (who has a janky hitbox that doesn’t always hit in front of him). I was stumped on these, and I tried pretty much everything except for the specific answer the game wanted; the pots couldn’t be broken with swords or bombs or any other attack like the smaller pots could, so I didn’t think hitting them anymore would be a worthwhile idea. The tree couldn’t be burned with fire, even though there are torches in the room and I thought that burning would be a logical solution, especially when fire could burn up your wooden shield back in Ocarina of Time, which has the exact same engine as this game. In neither case does rolling into them as regular link make sense (I don’t understand how a 10 year old boy hitting a pot three times his size would make a spider the size of a dog bounce out from the top, or how doing the same thing would knock them down from a tree), and I actually did try hitting them with Goron link, but neither time did it work at first, partially because of the aforementioned janky hitbox, but with the pot room specifically, you can’t see the skulltulas, so it’s impossible to tell which ones they’re in. You’re supposed to rely on the sound they make to determine where they are, but there are two of them and the pots are so close together that it’s impossible to determine which ones they’re in by sound alone.

I’m explaining my process in so much detail to try and show how this game often requires one specific solution to problems that realistically have multiple, and that it often discouraged experimentation and just made me frustrated. I could give more examples, but I’m hoping that these were enough to prove my point. I realize that this is pretty standard early Zelda stuff, but again, I found it the most egregious here.

I’ve been very negative so far, and perhaps even really nitpicky, but I’m trying to give an accurate description of what my experience playing this game for the first time was like. With that said, I think it’s time to move on to the part of Majora’s Mask that I really liked: the side-questy part.

The other half of this game has to do with the game’s time loop mechanic, the world of Termina itself, and the side quests associated with the games many characters. I actually don’t have a lot to say about them, surprisingly enough, but this part of the game is the real bread and butter, pretty much the only thing anyone ever talks about, and exclusively why everyone loves it so much.

This part of the game is focused exclusively on the narrative, and I think it is an interesting parallel to Ocarina of Time’s narrative. In Ocarina of Time, the focus was on Ganondorf; he was a constant intimidating figure, his influences on the decay of the world was very authentic and impossible to ignore, and the entire story centered around the importance of stopping him. In Majora’s Mask, the focus isn’t on the villain and their effect on the world (I’ll talk more about that later), but rather on the people that already existed in that world and how their lives have been impacted.

In that regard, Majora’s Mask is a massive success. The people that inhabit the land of Termina are about as far from stock characters as you could possibly get. They all have their own schedules that revolve around the time loop, and by reading their dialogue you learn so much about their ambitions and personalities. At first I took the curious shop owner to be some shady creep, but learning that he was actually one of Kafei’s closest friends and helps both of you in Kafei’s quest made me appreciate him as more than some NPC, but as a multi-faceted human being.

And the time loop being used as a way to have jumbles of polygons feel like people with their own lives and agendas is one thing, but it also reinforces the air of hopelessness surrounding this world as well. I start to feel a little funny whenever the last six hours begin to tick down, as I see the moon almost take up the entire sky, with most of clock down deserted and the few who are left either panicking, hopeless, or have accepted their demise. There’s a somberness that comes with the realization that the end of the three days is inevitable, so you reset the cycle with the somewhat vain hope that next time things may be different.

I could go on, but I likely don’t need to say anything that you already believe or have heard countless other people praise, and I don’t want to spoil some of these best moments, because I absolutely agree that this is where Majora’s Mask is at its best. Nothing is as it seems and seeing everything that happens is excellent (I will say my personal favorite quests were the Romani sisters, Kafei and Anju, and perhaps ironically the hand in the toilet).

But here’s where I get a bit less positive again. For as much as I love this part of the game, I think that it isn’t enough to save the game from how much I didn’t like the Zelda part of it. I also think that it could have been so much more than what it already is. I have a few complaints and a couple suggestions for how I think this could have been even better.

One thing that isn’t necessarily a complaint but still something I wanted to point out is that I was surprised by how many lighthearted moments there were in the game. Perhaps this is due to this game’s insurmountable hype, but I had always heard that Majora’s Mask was creepy, scary, unsettling, disturbing, and depressing. While it certainly is all of these things in moments, I guess I was expecting something more along the lines of Dark Souls, Metroid, Hollow Knight, or Hyper Light Drifter, where the atmosphere is absolutely unrelenting in the emotion it’s trying to convey, and for me Majora’s Mask wasn’t that. It is surprisingly colorful, especially for an N64 game, and there are plenty of very silly moments, from the goofy writing, to bonkers characters like Tingle, to the all the energetic and carnival-y music (a lot of which was carried over from Ocarina of Time). I imagine some people really like this diversity (plenty of games have conveyed multiple emotions while still having one central tone after all), but it certainly wasn’t what I thought it would be given what I had heard about this game.

Now I actually do think that the tone is slightly worsened by one thing however: the ocarina of time itself. I said already how I think the time loop is a great gameplay mechanic for telling the stories within Termina, and I especially like how much more use it has compared to Ocarina of Time. However, I can’t help but feel like the ability to freely control time at will takes away from the tone of the game and the stories of the characters. These stories are undeniably complex and emotional af, but by being able to reset the cycle at will as many times as I damn well want, I think it takes away from it. Link is practically a god in terms of what he’s capable of doing. There’s absolutely no limit or consequence to his power, and the more I realized that, the more the gravity of the situation lessened. The inevitability of this world’s destruction and the deaths of its inhabitants began to feel less and less inevitable as I realized I have an infinite amount of time to get everything just right. Perhaps with this realization also comes the realization that in this current loop there can also never be a happy ending, but for me I found my unlimited power came at the cost of me being a bit less invested in what happens to this place and feeling like there was a lot less tension (which I think that keyword tension is really important for both the story and vibe of the game). It also doesn’t help that character quests are completely reset when the cycle is reset, which makes sense of course, but also takes away from their impact, at least for me.

One big missed opportunity that I did notice (which I think contributes to both the lackluster stories within the four major areas as well as my issue with how Link’s unlimited use of the ocarina diminishes the impact of the stories in clock town) is how much Skull Kid’s significance is weakened as the game goes on. Once you get the Ocarina of Time from him in the first cycle, you don’t see him again until the very end of the game. You get one cutscene showing how he became friends with Tatl and Tael, but aside from that he has absolutely no presence in the main story. This is so baffling to me, because the characters in all of the major areas refer to Skull Kid as being the one to cause all the terrible things that are happening, and I’m wondering how that’s even possible and why we never see it. The time between when Link meets Skull Kid in the opening cutscene and when he arrives in Termina is like 10 minutes tops, and we play through our first three days arriving here over and over again. Given how detailed the conflicts in these major areas are and how little time there was for Skull Kid to set them all up, I have doubts that he actually could have been that fast. Sure, it’s possible that Skull Kid set all this up before we even showed up, but there’s also no indication that that is the case from what I recall.

What if we had seen Skull Kid actually wreaking havoc on these places? This alone could accomplish so many things within the story. 1. It would make Link’s drive to defeat Skull Kid much stronger, because he would have a constant presence AND he would always be one step ahead of us. Despite the fact that we can reset time as much as we want, we’re still not fast enough to stop Skull Kid before he wrecks everything (that alone I think would resolve my problem of Link being too powerful). 2. It would make the struggles of these places directly link (hehe) with our own. The stories in the four main areas aren’t nearly as interesting or fleshed out as the stories of the people of clock town are, and I really didn’t care about them to the same extent that I cared about clock town’s residents. If we saw Skull Kid cause the conflicts of the four major areas, we would have a constant threat as the source of everything, and it would help all the stories come together, not to mention make them more interesting 3. It would make the atmosphere of Termina even richer. If we were able to see these places, if even only for a brief second, right before Skull Kid destroyed them, we would have a reference point to know how joyful these places were before Skull Kid arrived, and we would have to live with the knowledge that these places will never be as happy, peaceful, or hopeful as they once were until we stop Skull Kid.

Wow, that’s a lot of thoughts. That’s all of my major points about the game. I’m sorry if this seemed overly negative, but considering how much this game is spoken about in a positive light, I felt that my criticisms were more relevant. I want to clarify that I don’t hate this game at all, I just feel like I have very little to add about what this game does well, and I mainly wanted to express why I think this game is overrated and wonder if anyone else shares my opinions or finds my thoughts interesting, or if I’m completely soulless and suck at video games and that’s why I don’t see Majora’s Mask as the masterpiece everyone else does. I should also clarify that it’s very common for otherwise great games to have notable flaws. Pokémon Platinum, Kingdom Hearts II and Breath of the Wild are my three favorite games of all time, and all of them have multiple noteworthy flaws and I would understand if those flaws ruined the games for some people.

I think that, much like Mother 3 and Superstar Saga, this is a game I will enjoy substantially more on a second playthrough. I definitely will play the 3DS version should I ever play this game again. But something I would really like to see is Bluepoint games remake Majora’s Mask. I realize that Nintendo is never going to outsource any of their properties ever again, but I would love to see what that would look like since Majora’s Mask is pretty much the only Zelda game that doesn’t have a definitive version to play.

Anyway, if you actually read all of this, thank you, and also please let me know if anything I said made sense or if you want to comment on any specific part.

an appalling, self-righteous, insecure act of apologia for a generation of emotionally distant fathers that characterises motherly love and affection as smothering, manipulative, and toxic, whilst characterising casual emotional neglect and abuse as Good, Actually.

god of war 4 is just as sexist as the earlier games in the series, it's just more crypto about it, and the vast swathes of people taken in by this completely surface-level nuance baffles me to a degree not seen since DmC: Devil May Cry was hailed as the "more mature" reboot that series needed despite the existence of a literal sniper-rifle abortion scene and the fact that every single female character in it was called "whore" ad nauseum.

the "one take" gimmick is just that: a total gimmick, adding absolutely nothing to the story and in many ways detracting from it. the staccato nature of this journey, of going up and down the same mountain and teleporting all over the place is only made more absurd by the camera framing this as an uninterrupted trek which it clearly is not.

also it plays like ass and you fight the same boss twenty times. i hope you like that animation of kratos slamming a big pillar down on an ogre because you're going to see it an awful lot.

EDIT: removed a shitty joke.

There’s little I can really say about Rain World without trespassing on somebody's definition of spoilers. Having something explained to you outright is obviously less engaging than experiencing it yourself, this is one of the biggest reasons games are so loved to begin with. But one of the things that makes Rain World so difficult to review is its near-absolute commitment to this idea. This doesn't seem like a contentious thing on the surface - "show don't tell" after all. But Rain World's strict difficulty and hesitancy to explain itself makes for an environment that seems apathetic as to whether or not the player learns all of its systems. To some that may sound like a welcome challenge and to others, a frustrating chore. And while the former is a good mindset to have, at the end of the day even those partial to the idea will almost certainly find themselves at their limits when it comes to the game’s obtuseness. Very little beyond the basic controls is explicitly laid out, and while there is some guidance given in the form of a little yellow overseer, his hints amount to abstract symbols and gestures that will still require much player interpretation. But even factoring that in, the onus is on you to discover the vast majority of the games systems with no guidance whatsoever. All this is to say, Rain World is a hard game but perhaps the hardest thing about it is getting into it to begin with.
It's impossible to lay out precisely the right mindset to enter the game with, but a step in the right direction would be to relinquish as many of your expectations as possible going in. That's a difficult and impenetrably vague thing to recommend but everything I've said up to this point can only do so much to communicate the experience of playing it. I'm sure most of you reading this can't remember this far back, but try to think of the sorts of games released in the 80s and even in the 90s. Though some classics stand out, a large chunk of games from the period would be considered unacceptable, obtuse, and bizarre if released in this day and age. This is partially because of technological limitations, but people tend to overstate the degree to which that's true. Pressing the X button in 1997 isn't any different from pressing it today, after all. No, the greatest difference between the design philosophies of then vs. now is rooted in the fact that, back then, there was less of a frame of reference for how a game should work. As time goes on, developers will stumble upon certain design decisions that tend to please the average consumer more. As they do this, other developers take note and start to implement these things in other games. The more this is done, the more ingrained certain expectations become in consumers. Whether or not this is a good thing is besides the point, if you’ve been paying attention you’ve probably figured out what I’m getting at here - that Rain World isn't bound by convention in the slightest. If it weren't for the rather robust physics system and detailed creature behaviors, the game, with its fundamental design philosophy intact, could easily have been released in the 90s and blended right in with its environment. As it is, nearly every critic I've seen hate on the game looks at the surface level choices that are simply contradictory to the gene pool of conventions that the game industry has evolved into. Many games hold it to be self-evident that mechanics should be taught in isolated, tutorialized environments so that the player can safely learn them. Many games hold it to be self-evident that lethal threats should be highly telegraphed beforehand to make for a consistent and fair experience, even the first time through. Many games hold it to be self-evident that the character's movement should be intuitive and respond as players expect, and that ideally the player won’t have most of their moveset outright hidden from them. I know many of you would scoff at the audacity of implying that denying these things could result in anything but a disaster. But think to yourself - just how much of that is based on your preconceived notions of what a game should do? Obviously if the game doesn't telegraph threats in a way players will understand at a glance, this leads to confusing, frustrating deaths until the player figures it out themselves. And if a game isn't thoroughly tutorialized, you'll go for some time without knowing what to do, and a similar thing could be said for the atypical movement. To those who have played the game and would criticize these things, I ask you this: can you really imagine a better version of the Rain World that does conform to your expectations? One where there are no creatures, but instead enemies, no environments but instead levels, and no fluid traversal but instead stiff movement? Whether you can appreciate it or not, the fact remains that the lengths Rain World goes to to preserve its artistic vision is absolutely integral to the experience. Never before have I lived through a more believable and dynamic world, nor have I felt each threat and relief with the same passion that the in-game character would. Essentially, the divide between player and character is as thin as I've ever seen it, you all but become a limp, pale, slug-creature starving for food, and your mindset adapts to view the world this way. And it's all thanks to the fact that the ecosystem is clearly not made for you. All of the animals have their own agendas, and the vast majority of the time you won't be fighting them, but running past or even hiding from them. They aren’t placed as obstacles or challenges to overcome, they are your equals and have the same goal as you - survival.
But if you find it hard to enjoy, do keep in mind that you're far from alone even among the most dedicated fans. It's hard to find someone out there who didn't have difficulty coming to appreciate the game. Any of its dedicated defenders, including myself, will tell you the same thing - that it takes many long breaks and even a couple restarts before you become hooked, but once you do, there's nothing else like it. The unshackling of one's expectations is a painful process in this case, but in the end, learning how to live and breathe as a foreign creature in an alien ecosystem is so enrapturing that no amount of my rambling can truly communicate it. In life, pain is essential to know true pleasure. In a similar vein, failure is essential to learn, and eventually to know success. At the end of the day, hating Rain World is an essential step to loving Rain World.

"You don't have to be insane to kill someone. You just have to think you're right." - Yoko Taro, Creative director of NieR and NieR Replicant Ver.1.22.

NieR (2010) was a very depressing game: It centered around the dusk of humanity, slowly dying out to an incurable disease as monsters roamed the countryside. More often than not, the quests our hero would embark on ended in tragedy, or in one extreme case, with the game itself seemingly mocking you for being the altruistic hero expected of the genre. The party is full of misfits, outcast from society, born into unfair circumstances beyond their control. Halfway through the game, the world itself began to feel bleak. Ugly. Cynical.

NieR (2010) was a game about compassion. The world was bleak, yes, but the people in it found the will to continue because of the people around them. Our hero, who's undying love for his family drives his every action, even when the world has kicked him while he was down, until every scrap of altruism and goodwill is used to justify his violent and self-destructive actions. Our party of misfits, who find true companionship in each other, even if they are all deeply flawed individuals. The people and townsfolk who still find it in them to look out for those closest to them, even in the roughest of times. The Shades you slaughter wholesale, who may be more like the party than any of them would ever like to believe. NieR was unique in that it's condemnation of violence did not start and end with the act itself, but rather the fact that everyone has something to fight for, whether you realize it or not. The horror comes from how easy it is to dehumanize, to dissociate from the slaughter, to kill, when you truly believe you are just in your every action.

Ver.1.22 at its core, is still the same game it was 11 years ago. I felt for the characters like I did with the original, every emotional beat hit just as hard as it hit in the 2010 original, and the new story content slotted into the existing story perfectly. But I worry what Ver.1.22 means for the franchise going forward.

The characters have been dolled up and made more accurate to the original illustrations, and yet the charm of uncanny people in an uncanny world (even if it was unintentional) was lost. The combat has been made silky-smooth like Automata, with fancy lock-on and big sweeping flourishes, and yet the heavy, brutal nature and weight of the original's combat that really sold the impact and viscera has been lost for the sake of flashy extravagance. The soundtrack has been souped up with more instruments, additional passages and a cinematic flair, and yet the original's sense of aggression, quiet and intimacy have been lost (looking at you "Shadowlord"). NieR was admittedly rough around the edges, and not every change was bad necessarily, but NieR has been made to conform to its much more successful younger sibling Automata, and in doing so, has lost some of it's original edge and feel. It's the Yakuza Kiwami to Automata's Yakuza Zero.

Ver.1.22 is no Demon Souls' (PS5), it's no Silent Hill HD Collection, it's no Conker Live & Reloaded. It's still a fantastic game, and a great way to enjoy the story of NieR and its characters. But in our era of re-releases and remasters, we're so blinded by the ideal of progress that we seem to be losing sight of what made our games unique in the first place.

Demon's Souls, and to a lesser extent Dark Souls, had the privilege of low expectations. Demon's Souls didn't necessarily earn its reputation as a challenging game through pure mechanical difficulty alone, but through its experimentation and obtuseness, both of which contributed to an oppressive atmosphere in synch with the audio-visual design. This has sadly, but perhaps inevitably, been lost in newer titles, particularly Bloodborne and Dark Souls III. I still love where the series is at, but the immersive, experiential side of Souls has diminished over the years. I love bosses like Slave Knight Gael or the Orphan of Kos, but I'm still waiting for another Maiden Astraea, still waiting for another moment that subverts expectations and leaves the player with an unusual emotional reaction.

Everything that makes Demon's Souls normatively 'worse' ultimately works in its favour, with jankiness and a general lack of polish contributing to the experience in unexpected ways. I think it poses interesting questions about the how aspects we think of as uncomplicated, such as performance stability, can impact the experience in complicated ways. Do the performance hiccups in the PS2 Shadow of the Colossus contribute to the feeling of scale? Is Blighttown less oppressive without the frame-rate drop? I don't think there are easy answers here. All I know is that, when I play Demon's Souls, all the thematic, aesthetic, audio, and mechanical elements are synchronous to a degree that they just aren't in Dark Souls III.

I'm finding it difficult to express my thoughts coherently, if you couldn't tell. All I'll say is that, playing Demon's Souls 12 years after release, after 5 similar games and another on the horizon, Demon's Souls is still some kind of masterpiece. For all its flaws, this game hits heights that haven't been reached since. I've yet to play the remake, but if the SotC remake is anything to go by I'm sure it will a) be outstanding on its own terms, and b) kind of miss the point.

this game is more fascinating and profound than it is "fun," and some people will be able to meet it on that level and love it despite how much it wants you to not love it. as a huge fan of Automata who never checked out the original, do i like this?

yes, i do, but i like it despite its design, not because of it. i like it because i'm interested in Yoko Taro as an auteur, i'm interested in unconventional experiences, and i love a game that gets extremely far up its own ass.

this game's auto-combat is excellent, it makes the game much more bearable for me, i also liberally used it in Automata, idgaf, i'm not here to get good at the relatively simplistic systems, i just want to be dazzled by the story/music/art, and it delivers on that.

i'm putting this one down for a bit because i need a break from the tedium, but i'll be back to finish it up and i can't wait to experience what it has in store for me with a little (or a lot) more time invested

I've seen a lot of talk, both positive and negative, about how the existence of this new Nier renders the old ones obsolete; some despise it because it represents the mainstreamification of a cult classic with little regard for the westernized protagonist they fell in love with, others adore it because it finally gives non-Japanese audiences the intended narrative while also providing a smoother gameplay experience. Admittedly, I fell hard into the former category during much of the early game, but after some introspection, I realized that the question is not if this updated remakaster replaces the original Replicant/Gestalt, or even what parts of it are better/worse than its predecessors, but rather how it complements them. Upon finishing this one, I believe all three can exist in harmony.

First off, this seems to be a literal update, built on top of the old version instead of remade from scratch, so most of Cavia's work still remains intact. The original game had a lot of idiosyncrasies that helped make it special in my eyes, and most of them are retained here by virtue of it being the exact same game at its core. I have a few nitpicks regarding the old goofy animations being replaced by ones lifted straight from Automata, though I suppose the developers felt that was a necessary alteration to make the combat feel snappier (I disagree, but whatever, it's fine). There are really just two major sticklers for me, which are the only reason I can't give this game a 5/5:

1) None of the original developers appear to be credited at the end unless they also returned to work on this remaster. I didn't even see Yoko Taro's long-time co-writers Sawako Natori and Hana Kikuchi mentioned, which is absolutely criminal considering they were responsible for penning much of the script. The one exception is D.K., who designed the characters for the 2010 release, and I'm glad they included him, but it's disrespectful as hell that Toylogic didn't think the original developers, the people who actually made the game we're playing here, were worthy of crediting. Yes, I am probably the only person in the world who cares about this, and no, I am not going to just accept it. To me, this isn't right. If games are art, then we need to treat the people who make them as artists. Even the Spyro Reignited Trilogy, an actual 1:1 remake using almost nothing directly taken from the PS1 games, saw fit to credit the original developers.

2) The new soundtrack is... I don't want to say "bad," but I don't like it much at all. Most of the rearrangements sound fine, and there's even one I might actually enjoy more than its original counterpart, but I find the majority of it either bland or overproduced by comparison. Obviously this is all subjective, but when I walked into the Northern Plains and heard the new Hills of Radiant Wind for the first time, I actually frowned. This was the moment that made me fall in love with Gestalt back on the PS3, and the new rendition with its muted instruments and subtler vocals couldn't be further from what I adored about it. The fact that there's no option to use the classic OST, but you CAN switch to the Automata OST, is maddening. Easily my biggest disappointment with this re-release, and probably the entire reason I felt so down on it at first.

The rest of my complaints are nitpicks that stem from having way too many brain cells devoted to Nier, so I'll spare you from them. In general, this is probably the version of the game I would recommend people to play nowadays. While I do think certain iconic moments had better voice acting in the original, the vast majority of the new vocal performances are a huge improvement, especially from the actors portraying Emil, Yonah, Devola/Popola, and Grimoire Noir. Everyone is at the top of their game here, and the remaster boasting full voice acting means we get 100% more Grimoire Weiss dubbing, a true delight that is not to be missed. As much as I prefer Papa Nier and a lot of his game's altered party banter, going back to a world where only half of Weiss' lines are voiced simply feels wrong.

The new content is also pretty damn good; maybe not worth paying full price for if you were satisfied by the original game, but I liked it a lot. The "Mermaid" sequence is unnecessary and threatens to harm the pacing, but it gives Seafront more of a purpose and I genuinely felt like something was missing when it wasn't there in my Gestalt playthrough. The last segment of it is very cool, cleverly integrating gameplay and story via Nier's otherwise entirely pointless RPG leveling system. Ending E is fascinating and handled in a really neat way, much better than I expected from reading the short story version years ago. I was always against its inclusion in a potential remake, but I think they made it work. Whereas Ending D was the perfect conclusion for the original release, with it mirroring Cavia's demise and the expectation that Nier would be forgotten in a few years, Ending E functions as a similar parallel in a post-Automata world where people love Yoko Taro's games and can't get enough of them. Some will scoff at its sappiness and appeals to new fans who started with the sequel, but I thought it was quite sweet and just all around exceptional.

In general, I think there's a lot to be gained by playing both OG Nier and Remastered Nier, Replicant Nier and Gestalt Nier. Most of the characterization is only subtly different between versions, but it can't be understated how different they feel from each other through a combination of script alterations, the disparity between animation quality, and the presence (or not) of Ending E. Classic Gestalt Nier is about a dumb old man who regularly falls on his ass bumbling around in a world he's outgrown, tunnel-visioning past harsh truths staring him in the face, and trying to rescue his daughter by thoughtlessly killing anyone who gets in his way. Modern Replicant Nier is about an acrobatic young man who has his innocence repeatedly shattered by events beyond his control, deliberately turns a blind eye to harsh truths, and uses rescuing his sister as an excuse for murder. Both versions of the protagonist are helpful to a fault and repeatedly put themselves in harm's way to ensure the safety of those around them (despite the things they're doing not necessarily being good at all), but while the Father and young Brother do this out of the kindness of their hearts, adult Brother does it more because it's the only life he's ever known. In the end, both characters make the same final decision, but the outcomes are completely different due to their interpersonal relationships causing the same action to be done for entirely different reasons.

Two protagonists, two tragedies, two development studios; this differentiation may not have been intentional, but it's brilliant, and somehow makes playing multiple versions of a game you already have to play three times to finish a rewarding experience.