Erato_Heti
2021
Musical Accompaniment (just choose to listen to however much of this that you can before you dont feel like it, my Music accompaniment guy is on strike right now).
So they took the Super Mario 3D World physics, movement system, and powerups and threw them into an open sandbox level with the benefits of Odyssey's collectible design of not disrupting your play on picking up the collectible. I really disliked how Odyssey handled its moons, many of them just being haphazardly littered in the playspace, in deserts etc. By the standards of Odyssey then, Bowser's Fury is great in that every collectable is focused, with 5 hanging around each lighthouse and a few others on islands that you use Plessie to explore to.
Bowser's Fury actually answers 2 other issues in a couple Nintendo games to. Another recent one Breath of the Wild's Bloodmoon mechanic. In that piece, after a significant amount of time passed, a cutscene would interrupt you and all the enemies would respawn with several strong enough near you chasing you. The issue with this mechanic was that there was no threat to it, at least not in the mid to late game, since you would be stocked up on pausable quick heal items, and it would be easy to simply outrun the enemies. Here, Bowser occurs during the 'night portion' as a legitimate threat. He has blocks fall from the sky near mario and will breath a sizable flame attack near the player that they have to find cover to avoid. On top of this, you can also ward off the Reptile's bile by collecting a catshine (the primary collectible) early thereby giving the player legitimate control over the desperation state and allowing them to do something that isn't just run away for a few minutes. At no point was I irritated with Bowser coming up to attack me, sometimes he would disrupt me from the shine I was trying to get, however Bowser himself is also nessecary to collect shines as well by baiting him to break blocks and running to spawning islands that show up during the night. I hope that the Zelda development team takes note of how this game handled the day/night cycle tension because it was honestly a mess in BotW and comparing it to this shows a night and day difference.
Aside from this, Plessie is also acts as a reply to the sailing mechanic in windwaker. Compared to a small sailboat, here you ride a large sea mammal that emits a hefty rumble on a jump giving a weight to the journey. They also make the travel time from one island to another proportionally significantly shorter than whatever you are trying to do on said island whereas Windwaker was oversatisfied with being sailing simulator for most of its runtime. One other way it prevents a feeling of tedium is making Plessie vital on her own terms for collecting around 20% of the possible shines. These factors all work to keep the player constantly in a satisfied relationship with the collectathon element while still keeping them engaged with the environment. You are on a satisfied unbroken pursuit from one place to the next. The only thing I wish Plessie had here is a small boost operator. None of the timer functions would have needed to be remanaged, a small boost would just let me 'feel' the animal actually moving faster whereas tilting the stick forward doesn't convey a great sense of a change in speed.
One interesting note here is that most of the movement is based around power up swapping. Your movement options like the long jump, triple jump, and backwards verticle jump are all still cramped or removes. While this wasnt particularly an issue in the linear level design of 3D World (Especially if you played as peach who had the raccoon suit power baked into her movekit), it does provide a small issue with the large sandbox playspace, instead you gain movement control through power up accumulation and management, being able to hold 5 of each power up and swap to them at will. For instance you climb the side of scaffolding with the Cat Powerup, swap to the Raccoon one, and then float over to the other piece of scaffolding. This mechanic works mostly well and its honestly way more appealing than trying to do the obnoxious hat combos jumps in Odyssey, and is more accessible in general, my only grievance here is that it renders the basic mushroom powerup redundant due to this accumulation, since all powerups make it a dead power up from random box hits and 100 coin level up drops. On that note, here I unveil once again my fundamental hatred with coins. I hate the constant bling sound on picking them up and they simply were not necessary to litter this playspace with. I might be one of the only people unironically annoyed and averse to the coins that isn't a no coins challenge runner but I must be honest in saying that if there is a way to avoid such redundancy its better off to do so.
Speaking of redundant, the 'theme' here is that everything is cat themed, cats sprawl all over non hostile spaces, cat power ups are used in the Giga Bowser fight, and cat ears appear from all the enemies you fight. The first two are fine, but the others push the experience too much into the realm of 'gimmick' or 'joke game' which doesn't really fit in with the pollution anxities and kaiju descalation neuroticism from Bowser Jr. While we are on the point of aesthetic presentation, the sludge effect looks great, especially with contemporary lighting and liquid physics effects, it drips and sputters out like an oil spill coming alive which is fantastic.
Spontaneous Critique on Cameras
What isn't great is the fact I have a sleepy camera for viewing it all. I believe that Mario 64 has actually the best camera in any 3D game I've played, which is a bold statement because most people dont really know how to use it and thus see it as a nuisance (which for me is part of the appeal to, I love having to fight with the camera sometimes in games its actually funny as hell to have Borne levels of confusing camera positions happen out of nowhere in the same way its funny when you long jump off a cliff when you meant to ground pound). To me, the Laikatu camera has so many functions in its favor that I could easily write a fluff piece about how it makes 64 a perfect game as its own, however to cut a long story short, there's a speed to which the camera will snap to the various fixed positions that isn't found in almost any 3D console game afterwards. Most 3D console platformers/action games have at least compensated the monopoly of this garbage 360 drone camera by making the speed for moving it reasonably fast (though not nearly fast enough imo). 3D world actually did bring back the fixed camera positions for the single player campaign, but made the positional change points slight and for the most part not tracking the player as they move forward. Most of the camerawork was semi isometric so I get why they couldn't port that over. However they could have at the very least made the camera more sensitive and move more quickly because stuff will attack you off screen and it will take a full 2 and a half seconds to reorient the visual space to figure out the confusion. This has been a problem in every Nintendo released 3D game since Mario Sunshine but at least Sunshine is kind of funny about it since Mario Sunshine has a wacky masocore energy to it in random bursts. The reason I'm highlighting it here then is that its the worst the camera has probably ever been for this. I was constantly getting annoyed in the Giga Bowser fights because the dude would roll off screen and I'd have to pan over forever to put him in view. This is simply an end point problem of what happens when you make games built around spectacle with contemporary graphics. For instance I would prefer that the sensitivity is increased, but this is a double bind, because with the graphical polish on display it would feel woozy and disorienting scrolling through that much information before settling the edge of the frame. I dont mind because I've played a lot of games, so I get why inexperienced players wouldn't enjoy that. With that said it's also a tacit point against staying in the realm of 3D graphical fidelity too long in general, because the issue ultimately becomes a problem of juggling visual business with the conveyance of context sensitive information.
I noticed for instance, in Resident Evil 4 Remaster that due to the visual business of the space, yellow paint effect is adorned to all the movable objects to convey context sensitivity. Meanwhile, the wacky camera controls in Metroid Prime Remaster were also stripped back due to the fact its 'antiquated' design comes in sharp contrast to an increase in visual business. The clear appeal is the market dominance of spectacle as immersion. I'm deeply opposed to it. Environmental detail is not that vital if it ambiguates control. Immersion comes through a sense of control or lack thereof, and through impassioned dialogue and interaction with other characters. A lot of modern 'polished' games offer a pretty environment for the expense of less control and clarity, and generally game environments have problems with letting characters speak for themselves. For instance here Bowser Jr. attempts a dialogue with Mario, and instead of letting that dialogue function on its own, an awkward disembodied narrator interprets what Bowser is saying to the player rather than letting the man speak for himself either through pictures alone or voice acting. You might be thinking 'so what?' well, I think the reason people have become too skiddish to letting characterization happen through imagery, body language animation, or various other non dialogue interactions is because people who play games for whatever reason seem to have trouble properly interpreting non dialogue interaction on their own. For instance Transparency made a strong argument in favor of the idea that people ragging on Balan Wonderland for the 'nonsensical story' were simply not paying attention and I would have to say I agree with her assessment. This is an ultimately sad state of affairs, I think its because people are afraid of the ambiguity in images but it creates another paradox. In modern gaming you have complex facial rotoscoping and detailed environments, both of which 'enhance' a raw interpretive ambiguity. Yet, instead of taking advantage of it games like Death Stranding and The Last of Us are obsessed with talking to you. In cutscenes, in the walk and talk, in dialogue boxes, etc. You can't share a stare or look at a painting. It's chatter until the day goes by. Instead of 'talking' this point to death I'll instead just vaguely gesture at Journey as a clear example of how non-verbal storytelling and non graphically 'real' space can be effective for immersion. Whether maximally so or not I leave up to your discretion.
Aside from these admittedly exaggerated complaints, I feel like what makes Bowser's Fury work in its favor in this format is its short runtime and compact open sandbox design. If the game was 3 times larger as some people are wistful about, a lot of what makes it work would begin to strain if it went on too long without being rehauled properly, all the moments I mentioned annoyed me are functionally footnote complaints to an otherwise solid experience. I recognize that such a difference is probably found in the fact most people who played this actually liked Odyssey as well when I find that one bland and flat.
So they took the Super Mario 3D World physics, movement system, and powerups and threw them into an open sandbox level with the benefits of Odyssey's collectible design of not disrupting your play on picking up the collectible. I really disliked how Odyssey handled its moons, many of them just being haphazardly littered in the playspace, in deserts etc. By the standards of Odyssey then, Bowser's Fury is great in that every collectable is focused, with 5 hanging around each lighthouse and a few others on islands that you use Plessie to explore to.
Bowser's Fury actually answers 2 other issues in a couple Nintendo games to. Another recent one Breath of the Wild's Bloodmoon mechanic. In that piece, after a significant amount of time passed, a cutscene would interrupt you and all the enemies would respawn with several strong enough near you chasing you. The issue with this mechanic was that there was no threat to it, at least not in the mid to late game, since you would be stocked up on pausable quick heal items, and it would be easy to simply outrun the enemies. Here, Bowser occurs during the 'night portion' as a legitimate threat. He has blocks fall from the sky near mario and will breath a sizable flame attack near the player that they have to find cover to avoid. On top of this, you can also ward off the Reptile's bile by collecting a catshine (the primary collectible) early thereby giving the player legitimate control over the desperation state and allowing them to do something that isn't just run away for a few minutes. At no point was I irritated with Bowser coming up to attack me, sometimes he would disrupt me from the shine I was trying to get, however Bowser himself is also nessecary to collect shines as well by baiting him to break blocks and running to spawning islands that show up during the night. I hope that the Zelda development team takes note of how this game handled the day/night cycle tension because it was honestly a mess in BotW and comparing it to this shows a night and day difference.
Aside from this, Plessie is also acts as a reply to the sailing mechanic in windwaker. Compared to a small sailboat, here you ride a large sea mammal that emits a hefty rumble on a jump giving a weight to the journey. They also make the travel time from one island to another proportionally significantly shorter than whatever you are trying to do on said island whereas Windwaker was oversatisfied with being sailing simulator for most of its runtime. One other way it prevents a feeling of tedium is making Plessie vital on her own terms for collecting around 20% of the possible shines. These factors all work to keep the player constantly in a satisfied relationship with the collectathon element while still keeping them engaged with the environment. You are on a satisfied unbroken pursuit from one place to the next. The only thing I wish Plessie had here is a small boost operator. None of the timer functions would have needed to be remanaged, a small boost would just let me 'feel' the animal actually moving faster whereas tilting the stick forward doesn't convey a great sense of a change in speed.
One interesting note here is that most of the movement is based around power up swapping. Your movement options like the long jump, triple jump, and backwards verticle jump are all still cramped or removes. While this wasnt particularly an issue in the linear level design of 3D World (Especially if you played as peach who had the raccoon suit power baked into her movekit), it does provide a small issue with the large sandbox playspace, instead you gain movement control through power up accumulation and management, being able to hold 5 of each power up and swap to them at will. For instance you climb the side of scaffolding with the Cat Powerup, swap to the Raccoon one, and then float over to the other piece of scaffolding. This mechanic works mostly well and its honestly way more appealing than trying to do the obnoxious hat combos jumps in Odyssey, and is more accessible in general, my only grievance here is that it renders the basic mushroom powerup redundant due to this accumulation, since all powerups make it a dead power up from random box hits and 100 coin level up drops. On that note, here I unveil once again my fundamental hatred with coins. I hate the constant bling sound on picking them up and they simply were not necessary to litter this playspace with. I might be one of the only people unironically annoyed and averse to the coins that isn't a no coins challenge runner but I must be honest in saying that if there is a way to avoid such redundancy its better off to do so.
Speaking of redundant, the 'theme' here is that everything is cat themed, cats sprawl all over non hostile spaces, cat power ups are used in the Giga Bowser fight, and cat ears appear from all the enemies you fight. The first two are fine, but the others push the experience too much into the realm of 'gimmick' or 'joke game' which doesn't really fit in with the pollution anxities and kaiju descalation neuroticism from Bowser Jr. While we are on the point of aesthetic presentation, the sludge effect looks great, especially with contemporary lighting and liquid physics effects, it drips and sputters out like an oil spill coming alive which is fantastic.
Spontaneous Critique on Cameras
What isn't great is the fact I have a sleepy camera for viewing it all. I believe that Mario 64 has actually the best camera in any 3D game I've played, which is a bold statement because most people dont really know how to use it and thus see it as a nuisance (which for me is part of the appeal to, I love having to fight with the camera sometimes in games its actually funny as hell to have Borne levels of confusing camera positions happen out of nowhere in the same way its funny when you long jump off a cliff when you meant to ground pound). To me, the Laikatu camera has so many functions in its favor that I could easily write a fluff piece about how it makes 64 a perfect game as its own, however to cut a long story short, there's a speed to which the camera will snap to the various fixed positions that isn't found in almost any 3D console game afterwards. Most 3D console platformers/action games have at least compensated the monopoly of this garbage 360 drone camera by making the speed for moving it reasonably fast (though not nearly fast enough imo). 3D world actually did bring back the fixed camera positions for the single player campaign, but made the positional change points slight and for the most part not tracking the player as they move forward. Most of the camerawork was semi isometric so I get why they couldn't port that over. However they could have at the very least made the camera more sensitive and move more quickly because stuff will attack you off screen and it will take a full 2 and a half seconds to reorient the visual space to figure out the confusion. This has been a problem in every Nintendo released 3D game since Mario Sunshine but at least Sunshine is kind of funny about it since Mario Sunshine has a wacky masocore energy to it in random bursts. The reason I'm highlighting it here then is that its the worst the camera has probably ever been for this. I was constantly getting annoyed in the Giga Bowser fights because the dude would roll off screen and I'd have to pan over forever to put him in view. This is simply an end point problem of what happens when you make games built around spectacle with contemporary graphics. For instance I would prefer that the sensitivity is increased, but this is a double bind, because with the graphical polish on display it would feel woozy and disorienting scrolling through that much information before settling the edge of the frame. I dont mind because I've played a lot of games, so I get why inexperienced players wouldn't enjoy that. With that said it's also a tacit point against staying in the realm of 3D graphical fidelity too long in general, because the issue ultimately becomes a problem of juggling visual business with the conveyance of context sensitive information.
I noticed for instance, in Resident Evil 4 Remaster that due to the visual business of the space, yellow paint effect is adorned to all the movable objects to convey context sensitivity. Meanwhile, the wacky camera controls in Metroid Prime Remaster were also stripped back due to the fact its 'antiquated' design comes in sharp contrast to an increase in visual business. The clear appeal is the market dominance of spectacle as immersion. I'm deeply opposed to it. Environmental detail is not that vital if it ambiguates control. Immersion comes through a sense of control or lack thereof, and through impassioned dialogue and interaction with other characters. A lot of modern 'polished' games offer a pretty environment for the expense of less control and clarity, and generally game environments have problems with letting characters speak for themselves. For instance here Bowser Jr. attempts a dialogue with Mario, and instead of letting that dialogue function on its own, an awkward disembodied narrator interprets what Bowser is saying to the player rather than letting the man speak for himself either through pictures alone or voice acting. You might be thinking 'so what?' well, I think the reason people have become too skiddish to letting characterization happen through imagery, body language animation, or various other non dialogue interactions is because people who play games for whatever reason seem to have trouble properly interpreting non dialogue interaction on their own. For instance Transparency made a strong argument in favor of the idea that people ragging on Balan Wonderland for the 'nonsensical story' were simply not paying attention and I would have to say I agree with her assessment. This is an ultimately sad state of affairs, I think its because people are afraid of the ambiguity in images but it creates another paradox. In modern gaming you have complex facial rotoscoping and detailed environments, both of which 'enhance' a raw interpretive ambiguity. Yet, instead of taking advantage of it games like Death Stranding and The Last of Us are obsessed with talking to you. In cutscenes, in the walk and talk, in dialogue boxes, etc. You can't share a stare or look at a painting. It's chatter until the day goes by. Instead of 'talking' this point to death I'll instead just vaguely gesture at Journey as a clear example of how non-verbal storytelling and non graphically 'real' space can be effective for immersion. Whether maximally so or not I leave up to your discretion.
Aside from these admittedly exaggerated complaints, I feel like what makes Bowser's Fury work in its favor in this format is its short runtime and compact open sandbox design. If the game was 3 times larger as some people are wistful about, a lot of what makes it work would begin to strain if it went on too long without being rehauled properly, all the moments I mentioned annoyed me are functionally footnote complaints to an otherwise solid experience. I recognize that such a difference is probably found in the fact most people who played this actually liked Odyssey as well when I find that one bland and flat.
Music Accompaniment
A solid murder mystery story that obeys the premise it set out before going for the 'twist'. A genuine whodunnit as a birthday party game for Amy. It's important to note in a slew of contemporary whodunit stories willing to break their own rules for a story: Disco Elysium (2019), Knives Out (2019), and even I would argue Tangle Tower (2014); The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog (2023) stands as a completely honest and 'solvable' mystery. There's a contained reasonable mystery to solve before it ramps the plot in the 3rd act. Impressive on its own, far moreso for an 'april fools' work. Not willing to settle on just this the text also flirts with the mundane realities and interest that shape our 2020s world: infinite runners, beatboxing, escape the room entertainment, and even the anxiety of labor as 'many hats' gig economy service worker. To be clear my point here is regardless of whether it's manifestly 'critical' of each of these factors, for instance many of the nerds among us might be disappointed that the game doesn't poke fun at infinite runners. Regardless though even the acknowledgement that these are reflections of contemporary helps the player feel more immersed in the world. On top of this, the decision to make the player character the 'watson' sidekick is a great way to offset failure states in a fun and realistic way such that if you are wrong about some fact Tails can wrestle the falsehood of your reasoning away allowing for the story to remain on rails.
As a light comic strip style 2 hour romp into the world of Sonic as a fun cheeky cartoon world, this is fantastic. It's nice to see the Sonic cast intermingle in mundane and non combative environments, something that has truthfully not really been done aside from the comic book series, even the cartoon show is your general 'enemy of the week' formula, so I hope that they feel comfortable exploring this friendlier character driven side of the world of Sonic. All we have to do is look at another story involved game like Sonic Frontiers (2022) which admittedly seems perfectly servicable as a 3D action platformer, to see the comtemporary problem with sonic. It's not an issue of tone but an issue of centralizing 1 protagonist at the expense of the ensemble. What Sonic Frontiers represents is Sonic as a military general because its constant planning and preparation through him, crucially none of the other characters talk to each other. The ensemble cast approach to sonic has been discarded ever since the 3 character structure of Sonic 06' (2006) was written off as a mistake. As such, Sonic has been the default protagonist, which is monotonous when you have many other main characters you could explore, like in the case of Shadow the Hedgehog (2005) because in SEGA's view this and the ensemble approach is probably hurting the bottom line. The most endearing factor of Sonic in the view of the fans is how characters that arent Sonic interact with each other, the ensemble story building element, one that by design depicts Sonic as stageplay with all the shakespearean matters of miscommunication and deceit that come with. It's a genuine tragedy that this side of sonic has been unexplored and, as such, we can see The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog as the first signs of finally awakening from that hibernation. If viewed that way, then its a wonderful awakening by all accounts.
My colleague Cadensia is a lot more sour about the entrapment of this work as an april fools prank, for her
"It may be a shame to point this out, but The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog, while a harmless experience, reveals the franchise's structural problems. Caught up in its own nostalgia and struggling to innovate around a character from another era, the Sonic Team proved incapable of coming up with a subversive and fresh concept. The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog manages to do so, but the title is still plagued by being an April Fool's joke, and only seen as such by SEGA. There's something about the company's management that prevents them from really trusting a new generation that might have insights to offer on a truly major project." (link)
However there's two rebuttals to this line of reasoning I want to note here. This is a cynicism that over rides the corporate future based on what we already know, but we can't exactly rule out the idea that this is a test pilot work from SEGA to see if people would be interested in this side of the Sonic world merely disguised as an april fools joke. All we have to do is glimpse at the blatantly unfinished nature of other April Fools VN titles like Bug Fables: April Fools! (2018) to see how the formula of such a prank is supposed to go. It's not supposed to be a rich and finished story its meant to be a gag. There's no gag here, its a full free Visual Novel with a firm 3 act structure and an evolving minigame. So I wouldn't really rule this out based on that extra polish and care put into a 'joke' as a form of test piloting.
Beyond just that, the work is so flourished and well considered that even if it is just a shallow gag on SEGA's part this is a 'gag' that slipped through the cracks and let be told a millennial tale. An important note here is that compared to other corporate mega giants, SEGA is not that interested in copyright takedowns. This is obvious when looking especially at the development of Sonic Mania (2017) being made in tandem with fan developers. I don't want to go all 'glory to the corporation' but if we consider it as SEGA continuing to sabotage their own world, the lack of IP restriction means that regardless of what gets made in a stuffy 'canonizing' office building this work functions regardless as a joyful emission to other fans as a reference point for acceptable fan games that take the world into account as an internal space.
Anyway regardless of all that, the art is great and the positioning of all the characters is wonderful. I only have a couple minor complaints: I was not actually able to gather information and properly interrogate Rogue and Blaze in the casino and I really wanted to especially since Rogue is my favourite character. Aside from that the 'what would Sonic do' logic that tails puts forward, messianic blasphemy aside, doesn't really make that much sense. The sonic run minigame sections are meant to reflect your character thinking, but I don't know, the quickness and desperation of doing it reads to me a lot more as paniced 'racing thoughts'. Aside from just that, Sonic is not that forward thinking, in fact literally the core point of Sonic Adventure (1998) and the cartoons generally is that while he has a great heart and is proactive, he's not that thoughtful so relying on him as a way of life doesnt make sense in that context. This is an easy enough fix though, if you have somebody smarter like tails in the piloting seat during these minigames. However its not a huge loss that it is this way regardless. I also didn't play the story all at once either, so unlike my good pal Cadensia these runner sections didn't bother me much. Not to be too maternal but if you feel something as exhausting that may be a good sign to take a break! :3
All in all I think The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog is a perfectly fine detective adventure romp, and the fact that it takes place on a sci fi enhanced train makes it all the more satisfying as a way to keep the story both self contained and enjoyable. If you like train transport like me it satisfies that itch immensely. A great way to spend a couple hours and in the process connect to the genuine aspects of Sonic's franchise that adult fans try to talk up. Really hope detective novelists check this one out, might play it again someday, that really is how much fun I had with it C:
A solid murder mystery story that obeys the premise it set out before going for the 'twist'. A genuine whodunnit as a birthday party game for Amy. It's important to note in a slew of contemporary whodunit stories willing to break their own rules for a story: Disco Elysium (2019), Knives Out (2019), and even I would argue Tangle Tower (2014); The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog (2023) stands as a completely honest and 'solvable' mystery. There's a contained reasonable mystery to solve before it ramps the plot in the 3rd act. Impressive on its own, far moreso for an 'april fools' work. Not willing to settle on just this the text also flirts with the mundane realities and interest that shape our 2020s world: infinite runners, beatboxing, escape the room entertainment, and even the anxiety of labor as 'many hats' gig economy service worker. To be clear my point here is regardless of whether it's manifestly 'critical' of each of these factors, for instance many of the nerds among us might be disappointed that the game doesn't poke fun at infinite runners. Regardless though even the acknowledgement that these are reflections of contemporary helps the player feel more immersed in the world. On top of this, the decision to make the player character the 'watson' sidekick is a great way to offset failure states in a fun and realistic way such that if you are wrong about some fact Tails can wrestle the falsehood of your reasoning away allowing for the story to remain on rails.
As a light comic strip style 2 hour romp into the world of Sonic as a fun cheeky cartoon world, this is fantastic. It's nice to see the Sonic cast intermingle in mundane and non combative environments, something that has truthfully not really been done aside from the comic book series, even the cartoon show is your general 'enemy of the week' formula, so I hope that they feel comfortable exploring this friendlier character driven side of the world of Sonic. All we have to do is look at another story involved game like Sonic Frontiers (2022) which admittedly seems perfectly servicable as a 3D action platformer, to see the comtemporary problem with sonic. It's not an issue of tone but an issue of centralizing 1 protagonist at the expense of the ensemble. What Sonic Frontiers represents is Sonic as a military general because its constant planning and preparation through him, crucially none of the other characters talk to each other. The ensemble cast approach to sonic has been discarded ever since the 3 character structure of Sonic 06' (2006) was written off as a mistake. As such, Sonic has been the default protagonist, which is monotonous when you have many other main characters you could explore, like in the case of Shadow the Hedgehog (2005) because in SEGA's view this and the ensemble approach is probably hurting the bottom line. The most endearing factor of Sonic in the view of the fans is how characters that arent Sonic interact with each other, the ensemble story building element, one that by design depicts Sonic as stageplay with all the shakespearean matters of miscommunication and deceit that come with. It's a genuine tragedy that this side of sonic has been unexplored and, as such, we can see The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog as the first signs of finally awakening from that hibernation. If viewed that way, then its a wonderful awakening by all accounts.
My colleague Cadensia is a lot more sour about the entrapment of this work as an april fools prank, for her
"It may be a shame to point this out, but The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog, while a harmless experience, reveals the franchise's structural problems. Caught up in its own nostalgia and struggling to innovate around a character from another era, the Sonic Team proved incapable of coming up with a subversive and fresh concept. The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog manages to do so, but the title is still plagued by being an April Fool's joke, and only seen as such by SEGA. There's something about the company's management that prevents them from really trusting a new generation that might have insights to offer on a truly major project." (link)
However there's two rebuttals to this line of reasoning I want to note here. This is a cynicism that over rides the corporate future based on what we already know, but we can't exactly rule out the idea that this is a test pilot work from SEGA to see if people would be interested in this side of the Sonic world merely disguised as an april fools joke. All we have to do is glimpse at the blatantly unfinished nature of other April Fools VN titles like Bug Fables: April Fools! (2018) to see how the formula of such a prank is supposed to go. It's not supposed to be a rich and finished story its meant to be a gag. There's no gag here, its a full free Visual Novel with a firm 3 act structure and an evolving minigame. So I wouldn't really rule this out based on that extra polish and care put into a 'joke' as a form of test piloting.
Beyond just that, the work is so flourished and well considered that even if it is just a shallow gag on SEGA's part this is a 'gag' that slipped through the cracks and let be told a millennial tale. An important note here is that compared to other corporate mega giants, SEGA is not that interested in copyright takedowns. This is obvious when looking especially at the development of Sonic Mania (2017) being made in tandem with fan developers. I don't want to go all 'glory to the corporation' but if we consider it as SEGA continuing to sabotage their own world, the lack of IP restriction means that regardless of what gets made in a stuffy 'canonizing' office building this work functions regardless as a joyful emission to other fans as a reference point for acceptable fan games that take the world into account as an internal space.
Anyway regardless of all that, the art is great and the positioning of all the characters is wonderful. I only have a couple minor complaints: I was not actually able to gather information and properly interrogate Rogue and Blaze in the casino and I really wanted to especially since Rogue is my favourite character. Aside from that the 'what would Sonic do' logic that tails puts forward, messianic blasphemy aside, doesn't really make that much sense. The sonic run minigame sections are meant to reflect your character thinking, but I don't know, the quickness and desperation of doing it reads to me a lot more as paniced 'racing thoughts'. Aside from just that, Sonic is not that forward thinking, in fact literally the core point of Sonic Adventure (1998) and the cartoons generally is that while he has a great heart and is proactive, he's not that thoughtful so relying on him as a way of life doesnt make sense in that context. This is an easy enough fix though, if you have somebody smarter like tails in the piloting seat during these minigames. However its not a huge loss that it is this way regardless. I also didn't play the story all at once either, so unlike my good pal Cadensia these runner sections didn't bother me much. Not to be too maternal but if you feel something as exhausting that may be a good sign to take a break! :3
All in all I think The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog is a perfectly fine detective adventure romp, and the fact that it takes place on a sci fi enhanced train makes it all the more satisfying as a way to keep the story both self contained and enjoyable. If you like train transport like me it satisfies that itch immensely. A great way to spend a couple hours and in the process connect to the genuine aspects of Sonic's franchise that adult fans try to talk up. Really hope detective novelists check this one out, might play it again someday, that really is how much fun I had with it C:
2023
Song Accompaniment
I've only done one cycle using as many continues as I needed, but I'm already convinced this is one of the best titles of the year so far.
A bold stance, so how can I possibly back it up? Well let's start from the difficulty structuring. A lot of SHMUP fans make a big deal about how finishing a game with 0 continues is proof of 'mastery' of the shmup at the bare minimum. That's when you can then properly speak about the mechanics from the standpoint of effective design or not so of course I'm not there. However I do find myself rolling my eyes at this stance because it's an opinion that reifies away the blunt reason for this to exist the way it does in the first place.
See, in the logic of most SHMUPs be it the Cave games or the Touhou franchise, the principle design approach is that you run in with a set number of lives and learn the patterns, die in the process and generally improve. This is all fine and well, with how short SHMUPs are there's a point to be made that it's in fact the main appeal. However, just taking this fact on its face reads as deeply unserious to me: The genuine reason SHMUPs have a 'continue' design in the first place is absolutely to crunch quarters. The genre is heralded for their difficulty on the idea of continuing through failure so you can master it in the reset, but if you step back for a moment it becomes obvious that the reason it's like this at all is because of a desire to play into arcade nostalgia and life design with a certain commercial process. For whatever reason the genre never adapted to early home console life systems, thereby going through a modular difficulty through the accessibility process from there. It never 'tested' out of itself. The translation to how it plays now is fundamentally awkward. As much as I like most of the Touhou games for instance, I hate the raw feeling of play being halted by a continue moment, that 'halt' is literally there for the player to pull a quarter out of their pocket. In a post-arcade era this has been translated to relaxing and finding resolve but since that resolve is usually on the timer there's generally a sense of panic. This is where Magic Vigilante intervenes, offering a slew of difficulties alterations: a modular life system health system that doubles the starting health, stage select, and most crucially a checkpoint based continue system.
On top of all this the designer even openly notes on the Itchio page that "Default value is 4. If you are not particular, I think the maximum value is fine.) Please use it because it recovers to this value when you clear the stage." Thereby openly encouraging the player to play on easy mode and then scale up from there.
For instance it's clear to me how the trajectory of difficulty scaling would work from here, you would play on 9 health until you get good enough to do a no CC run. Then on 8, etc. This along with the stage select allows the player to treat the game less like an endurance test, and more like a rhythm game. This design structure has more in common with being able to practice different movements in the later Guitar Hero titles or Rhythm Heaven than it does with its other genre contemporaries.
That said, SHMUP experts would probably be quick to outline that this random itchio browser title is just the first game I happened to play that does this rather than the first to actually do so, and I certainly concede to that point in advance. However, there's a fair reason to fixate on it anyway: it has a nice domino effect on the power fantasy approach to the genre here. In my view, games that give modular difficulty and encourage playing on an easier mode encourage the treatment of their world and environment as a power fantasy foremost. With a genre all about the fantasy of overwhelming ballistic warfare and competency being built through twitch dodging complex attack patterns, it's a genre almost entirely built for that power fantasy, yet most safeguard it behind the endurance test and I have to admit that I at least, don't typically associate power fantasies with endurance. I'll cut to the chase and say the lo fi magical girl power fantasy is an adorable approach to the genre. The whole experience has you fighting other magical girls and various bunnies in the meantime. The pixelated visuals and simplification of the enemies as red blobs that shoot out red arrows help keep incredible visual clarity, meanwhile the urban street scroll backgrounds. God these backgrounds are beautiful, they are still pixelated but done with a higher level of pixelation than all of the foreground enemies and characters thus allowing for various scrolling effects to happen without being disorienting. It all comes together with grace, feeling like a hazy dream you'd expect from a Cardcaptor Sakura fan.
Finally I will touch on the play mechanics themselves. This is a horizontal SHMUP which admittedly is not something I play often just because they don't generally get recommended. However if I were to hazard why, its likely that having to keep track of bullet patterns horizontally requires more of your peripheral vision thereby filtering the players who already have good periphery already, or forcing people with weak peripheral vision to glimpse back and forth more putting them at a disadvantage. Whereas, vertical shooters have a much more intuitive sense of tracking since the movement of the eye up and down goes faster. Bullet Hell games in general cause a lot less smooth eye pattern movement in particular, that is to say the eye is constantly jumping between points and the points in a vertical space are far easier to intuitate than a horizontal one. I use the terms 'probably' and 'likely' here because I'm not in fact an eye doctor. However, if you want a hypothetical reference point to better understand what I mean, think of how Tetris is laid out, the blocks fall vertical right? Well we could just think of the 'gravity' of Tetris if the game was played sideways as being a game about 'magnets' instead of gravitational measurement. I think you would agree that this Horizontris would be a lot less easy to measure and account for especially if the screen to do so is very large. Less hypothetically I have tended to find that when I play Pacman it's easier to run away from ghosts vertically than horizontally because I can more easily chart my escape route.
The point of this rather strange illustration here is to point out that if this is in any case true it thus explains the vertical dominance in the genre. Therefore it stands to reason that horizontal bullet hells have to in some way justify it through the mechanics. This is where Magic Vigilante shines most then through its main mechanic: Slow down. You build up a slow down meter through beating enemies that you can hold and after a small delay will allow to to more discretely navigate the bullet patterns. If you hold for long enough, you do a powerful counter attack, but it eats more meter in the process. This slowdown actually lasts for a really long time allowing for the player to fully gauge and process the bullets behind the ones you're currently avoiding. On top of this the boss health bar is actually positioned in 2 places, on both sides of the screen allowing for the player to more accurately assess how much more they need to navigate the wave. Finally, the game fixes this through having a wide range of resolution options so you can make the screen smaller or larger to fit your needs. The result is that it allows for a great sense of playfulness that comes from horizontal patterns, giving the odd sense that you are 'squeezing' through the bullets rather than flying past them.
Combine that with an absolutely adorable enemy design, wherein the player is fighting Bunnies and Mice blobs as mini bosses, and a kicking Progressive Electronic Orchestral soundtrack, and I think you have one of the best SHMUPs staring you down in a while! In contrast to the unfortunately benign droll of this write up, the effect is far more minimalist and gorgeous than I let on. It's also far more difficult than I make it sound to. Give it a shot!
I've only done one cycle using as many continues as I needed, but I'm already convinced this is one of the best titles of the year so far.
A bold stance, so how can I possibly back it up? Well let's start from the difficulty structuring. A lot of SHMUP fans make a big deal about how finishing a game with 0 continues is proof of 'mastery' of the shmup at the bare minimum. That's when you can then properly speak about the mechanics from the standpoint of effective design or not so of course I'm not there. However I do find myself rolling my eyes at this stance because it's an opinion that reifies away the blunt reason for this to exist the way it does in the first place.
See, in the logic of most SHMUPs be it the Cave games or the Touhou franchise, the principle design approach is that you run in with a set number of lives and learn the patterns, die in the process and generally improve. This is all fine and well, with how short SHMUPs are there's a point to be made that it's in fact the main appeal. However, just taking this fact on its face reads as deeply unserious to me: The genuine reason SHMUPs have a 'continue' design in the first place is absolutely to crunch quarters. The genre is heralded for their difficulty on the idea of continuing through failure so you can master it in the reset, but if you step back for a moment it becomes obvious that the reason it's like this at all is because of a desire to play into arcade nostalgia and life design with a certain commercial process. For whatever reason the genre never adapted to early home console life systems, thereby going through a modular difficulty through the accessibility process from there. It never 'tested' out of itself. The translation to how it plays now is fundamentally awkward. As much as I like most of the Touhou games for instance, I hate the raw feeling of play being halted by a continue moment, that 'halt' is literally there for the player to pull a quarter out of their pocket. In a post-arcade era this has been translated to relaxing and finding resolve but since that resolve is usually on the timer there's generally a sense of panic. This is where Magic Vigilante intervenes, offering a slew of difficulties alterations: a modular life system health system that doubles the starting health, stage select, and most crucially a checkpoint based continue system.
On top of all this the designer even openly notes on the Itchio page that "Default value is 4. If you are not particular, I think the maximum value is fine.) Please use it because it recovers to this value when you clear the stage." Thereby openly encouraging the player to play on easy mode and then scale up from there.
For instance it's clear to me how the trajectory of difficulty scaling would work from here, you would play on 9 health until you get good enough to do a no CC run. Then on 8, etc. This along with the stage select allows the player to treat the game less like an endurance test, and more like a rhythm game. This design structure has more in common with being able to practice different movements in the later Guitar Hero titles or Rhythm Heaven than it does with its other genre contemporaries.
That said, SHMUP experts would probably be quick to outline that this random itchio browser title is just the first game I happened to play that does this rather than the first to actually do so, and I certainly concede to that point in advance. However, there's a fair reason to fixate on it anyway: it has a nice domino effect on the power fantasy approach to the genre here. In my view, games that give modular difficulty and encourage playing on an easier mode encourage the treatment of their world and environment as a power fantasy foremost. With a genre all about the fantasy of overwhelming ballistic warfare and competency being built through twitch dodging complex attack patterns, it's a genre almost entirely built for that power fantasy, yet most safeguard it behind the endurance test and I have to admit that I at least, don't typically associate power fantasies with endurance. I'll cut to the chase and say the lo fi magical girl power fantasy is an adorable approach to the genre. The whole experience has you fighting other magical girls and various bunnies in the meantime. The pixelated visuals and simplification of the enemies as red blobs that shoot out red arrows help keep incredible visual clarity, meanwhile the urban street scroll backgrounds. God these backgrounds are beautiful, they are still pixelated but done with a higher level of pixelation than all of the foreground enemies and characters thus allowing for various scrolling effects to happen without being disorienting. It all comes together with grace, feeling like a hazy dream you'd expect from a Cardcaptor Sakura fan.
Finally I will touch on the play mechanics themselves. This is a horizontal SHMUP which admittedly is not something I play often just because they don't generally get recommended. However if I were to hazard why, its likely that having to keep track of bullet patterns horizontally requires more of your peripheral vision thereby filtering the players who already have good periphery already, or forcing people with weak peripheral vision to glimpse back and forth more putting them at a disadvantage. Whereas, vertical shooters have a much more intuitive sense of tracking since the movement of the eye up and down goes faster. Bullet Hell games in general cause a lot less smooth eye pattern movement in particular, that is to say the eye is constantly jumping between points and the points in a vertical space are far easier to intuitate than a horizontal one. I use the terms 'probably' and 'likely' here because I'm not in fact an eye doctor. However, if you want a hypothetical reference point to better understand what I mean, think of how Tetris is laid out, the blocks fall vertical right? Well we could just think of the 'gravity' of Tetris if the game was played sideways as being a game about 'magnets' instead of gravitational measurement. I think you would agree that this Horizontris would be a lot less easy to measure and account for especially if the screen to do so is very large. Less hypothetically I have tended to find that when I play Pacman it's easier to run away from ghosts vertically than horizontally because I can more easily chart my escape route.
The point of this rather strange illustration here is to point out that if this is in any case true it thus explains the vertical dominance in the genre. Therefore it stands to reason that horizontal bullet hells have to in some way justify it through the mechanics. This is where Magic Vigilante shines most then through its main mechanic: Slow down. You build up a slow down meter through beating enemies that you can hold and after a small delay will allow to to more discretely navigate the bullet patterns. If you hold for long enough, you do a powerful counter attack, but it eats more meter in the process. This slowdown actually lasts for a really long time allowing for the player to fully gauge and process the bullets behind the ones you're currently avoiding. On top of this the boss health bar is actually positioned in 2 places, on both sides of the screen allowing for the player to more accurately assess how much more they need to navigate the wave. Finally, the game fixes this through having a wide range of resolution options so you can make the screen smaller or larger to fit your needs. The result is that it allows for a great sense of playfulness that comes from horizontal patterns, giving the odd sense that you are 'squeezing' through the bullets rather than flying past them.
Combine that with an absolutely adorable enemy design, wherein the player is fighting Bunnies and Mice blobs as mini bosses, and a kicking Progressive Electronic Orchestral soundtrack, and I think you have one of the best SHMUPs staring you down in a while! In contrast to the unfortunately benign droll of this write up, the effect is far more minimalist and gorgeous than I let on. It's also far more difficult than I make it sound to. Give it a shot!
2023
Content Notice: NSFW discussion, mild feminist observations, Market analysis
Musical Accompaniment (looped)
It's a jigsaw slide game where you click on two squares of a larger image and swap them to complete the image. In this case, its naked anime women, often of a folk mideval or halloween variety. All white skinned cis women with these absolutely placid stares. No girl in here does the classic anime aheago, in part because 4 out of the 20 'levels' is just a slightly changed version of the same girl wearing a big hat.
I'm not somebody of a firm moralist streak. For instance there's a fairly easy slam dunk critique here that the slaughterhouse B roll 'chopping' of womens bodies and mixing them around that makes this jumble of flesh and genitals you have to properly taxidermy whole again is as objectifying as it gets. However, to the extent this is a fair criticism, it matters a lot less to me than real life issues like wage gaps or structural transphobia. In fact I've argued before that obsessing over obviously sexual content as if its a plight against women is missing the point because sexual pleasure comes out of a connection between objects where they objectify each other. I wont relitigate it here. You can read that point here if you're interested. It's just so much to say it would be contradictory rhetoric for me to take a stab here.
If we just think about the pure mechanics, in spite of it being obvious shovelware. I can't truly posture that I learned nothing from playing. It did give me a sense of spacial awareness of the body and spacial reasoning in general, and due to the fact the difficulty does not actually increase I did eventually get pretty good at doing the image puzzles quickly. However the sexual component of this text is actually at odds with itself do to how all of it is just them posing with no penetration or anything, and there's a looping dentist type lounge music song adorning it all. It gives an eerie quality that makes me think less of any arousal and more of a serial killer butchering a corpse to classical music.
One of the reasons I felt 'something' is that I was playing fast with the intentions of getting my 30 cents back within the 2 hour refund window just to see if I could. I saw there was 20 levels and I thought 'I wonder if I can beat it in time'. I got to the end in 70 minutes. However this very cynical speedrun motive on my part reveals a whole underbelly of the Steam Platform as a marketplace. Were this to be free or non refundable I would have had a remarkably more disturbed experience but that sensation got rerouted. I had in effect created an absurd goal that prevents any feeling of forlorn wistfulness in the moment on shovelware, in my mind there was no time for that. This commodification goes one foot deeper. The reason why anime porn shovelware is so popular on steam is that it by design fills the niche its going after pretty well. Steam as a platform asks for an upfront platforming cost of 100 dollars. In order to make your money back on a 1 dollar game you need 100 people to buy it and not refund it. Since its with your labor the best way to profit is to put as little labor as possible into the work. The trick of making it porn related is the important part because if you can get people to feel gratified they wont refund it but also by making it porn you guarantee that anybody that wouldn't like it wont review bomb you since you need to buy the game to rate it. This entire artifice forces by design developers to basically game the system in this way. The only reason I got this at all is because of the stupid steam badge resell money. Valve is not as evil a gaming corporation as they come, however the dominance of their digital platform is such that needless devs are stressed to make works that make back their 100$ publishing fee by design. As such, the game needs to constantly 'titilate' the player as much as it can get away with. Whether it be through bright flashing casino visual flair like Vampire Survivors, achievement spam like Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, or literal tits in the titilation like Horny Spell the general valuation is to keep the player engaged so long as to not realize at the very least 2 hours passed.
Steam as a platform is a flea market garbage place where everything is valued in level ups, badges, purchasable cosmetics, endless discounting tactics, devs are given no control over the layout for their store pages. Itchio is so much more developer friendly its not even worth mentioning, but the sad reality is thats not where the money is. Thus this titles pseudo guro eerieness is not a glitch so much as literally what consumption forces incentivize when all games are boiled down into 'competitiors' by attention economies and self invested unpaid wage labor. The attention economy is always itself a gamble and usually requires effective advertising campaigns so its better to just fulfill the base desires of the players you can pull in from the tags.
Even by this incredibly cynical economic metric then, Horny Spell has probably failed to make its money back. There is only 1 user review, and while the amount of purchasers is not accessible information, the fact there are 0 plays on this title at the time of writing before I got here, is telling. However, the question should not be 'did the developer achieve their economic goal' because quite frankly its this vague competative thinking that obscures the reality that, in my view, everyone should be able to achieve the economic goal of not worrying about rent, food, etc. because the system that puts a price on basic necessities in the first place should be undone.
I feel the question should moreso be 'is this really how we want to be titilated?' that question depends very much on what you're actually input into it. It can range everything from achievement spam to rouguelites to various porn game genres. However I feel like it's worth asking it towards Steam, as a platform itself: Is this how we want to consume?
I don't think it is, I pirate games or hell even buy of GOG sometimes in part to avoid the constant 'player is online' and 'external achievement' hell. I prefer almost every other way to get games than from Steam because I fundamentally think that the platform hijacks my mental processes and overwhelms me with so much of a library that my only response is to rip open new cheap games instead like they are funkopops or card packs. Horny Spell is not a reflection of authentic sexual desire, its a desperate facsimile of what Steam aka Valve inc. want.
When I put it that way, I kinda feel sorry for the poor bastard...
"Do you have a favorite? Me? It's hard to choose. They're all my children." - Chunkopop G-Tech Exec
Musical Accompaniment (looped)
It's a jigsaw slide game where you click on two squares of a larger image and swap them to complete the image. In this case, its naked anime women, often of a folk mideval or halloween variety. All white skinned cis women with these absolutely placid stares. No girl in here does the classic anime aheago, in part because 4 out of the 20 'levels' is just a slightly changed version of the same girl wearing a big hat.
I'm not somebody of a firm moralist streak. For instance there's a fairly easy slam dunk critique here that the slaughterhouse B roll 'chopping' of womens bodies and mixing them around that makes this jumble of flesh and genitals you have to properly taxidermy whole again is as objectifying as it gets. However, to the extent this is a fair criticism, it matters a lot less to me than real life issues like wage gaps or structural transphobia. In fact I've argued before that obsessing over obviously sexual content as if its a plight against women is missing the point because sexual pleasure comes out of a connection between objects where they objectify each other. I wont relitigate it here. You can read that point here if you're interested. It's just so much to say it would be contradictory rhetoric for me to take a stab here.
If we just think about the pure mechanics, in spite of it being obvious shovelware. I can't truly posture that I learned nothing from playing. It did give me a sense of spacial awareness of the body and spacial reasoning in general, and due to the fact the difficulty does not actually increase I did eventually get pretty good at doing the image puzzles quickly. However the sexual component of this text is actually at odds with itself do to how all of it is just them posing with no penetration or anything, and there's a looping dentist type lounge music song adorning it all. It gives an eerie quality that makes me think less of any arousal and more of a serial killer butchering a corpse to classical music.
One of the reasons I felt 'something' is that I was playing fast with the intentions of getting my 30 cents back within the 2 hour refund window just to see if I could. I saw there was 20 levels and I thought 'I wonder if I can beat it in time'. I got to the end in 70 minutes. However this very cynical speedrun motive on my part reveals a whole underbelly of the Steam Platform as a marketplace. Were this to be free or non refundable I would have had a remarkably more disturbed experience but that sensation got rerouted. I had in effect created an absurd goal that prevents any feeling of forlorn wistfulness in the moment on shovelware, in my mind there was no time for that. This commodification goes one foot deeper. The reason why anime porn shovelware is so popular on steam is that it by design fills the niche its going after pretty well. Steam as a platform asks for an upfront platforming cost of 100 dollars. In order to make your money back on a 1 dollar game you need 100 people to buy it and not refund it. Since its with your labor the best way to profit is to put as little labor as possible into the work. The trick of making it porn related is the important part because if you can get people to feel gratified they wont refund it but also by making it porn you guarantee that anybody that wouldn't like it wont review bomb you since you need to buy the game to rate it. This entire artifice forces by design developers to basically game the system in this way. The only reason I got this at all is because of the stupid steam badge resell money. Valve is not as evil a gaming corporation as they come, however the dominance of their digital platform is such that needless devs are stressed to make works that make back their 100$ publishing fee by design. As such, the game needs to constantly 'titilate' the player as much as it can get away with. Whether it be through bright flashing casino visual flair like Vampire Survivors, achievement spam like Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, or literal tits in the titilation like Horny Spell the general valuation is to keep the player engaged so long as to not realize at the very least 2 hours passed.
Steam as a platform is a flea market garbage place where everything is valued in level ups, badges, purchasable cosmetics, endless discounting tactics, devs are given no control over the layout for their store pages. Itchio is so much more developer friendly its not even worth mentioning, but the sad reality is thats not where the money is. Thus this titles pseudo guro eerieness is not a glitch so much as literally what consumption forces incentivize when all games are boiled down into 'competitiors' by attention economies and self invested unpaid wage labor. The attention economy is always itself a gamble and usually requires effective advertising campaigns so its better to just fulfill the base desires of the players you can pull in from the tags.
Even by this incredibly cynical economic metric then, Horny Spell has probably failed to make its money back. There is only 1 user review, and while the amount of purchasers is not accessible information, the fact there are 0 plays on this title at the time of writing before I got here, is telling. However, the question should not be 'did the developer achieve their economic goal' because quite frankly its this vague competative thinking that obscures the reality that, in my view, everyone should be able to achieve the economic goal of not worrying about rent, food, etc. because the system that puts a price on basic necessities in the first place should be undone.
I feel the question should moreso be 'is this really how we want to be titilated?' that question depends very much on what you're actually input into it. It can range everything from achievement spam to rouguelites to various porn game genres. However I feel like it's worth asking it towards Steam, as a platform itself: Is this how we want to consume?
I don't think it is, I pirate games or hell even buy of GOG sometimes in part to avoid the constant 'player is online' and 'external achievement' hell. I prefer almost every other way to get games than from Steam because I fundamentally think that the platform hijacks my mental processes and overwhelms me with so much of a library that my only response is to rip open new cheap games instead like they are funkopops or card packs. Horny Spell is not a reflection of authentic sexual desire, its a desperate facsimile of what Steam aka Valve inc. want.
When I put it that way, I kinda feel sorry for the poor bastard...
"Do you have a favorite? Me? It's hard to choose. They're all my children." - Chunkopop G-Tech Exec
2002
One of the detriments of having unskippable 10 minute cutscene at the beginning of the game is that it makes starting over a slog and limit the child player from being able to enjoy their new 'toy'.
One of the positives of a 10 minute unskippable cutscene though is it makes it feel cinematic if you do a decent job of it. The turbulence private plane ride opener with peach, F.L.U.D.D. yapping about how horrible everything is, and Bowser tearing up with his bastard son makes it feel so unnecessarily cinematic it might as well be a movie for me.
Which it is, when people bring up the mario movie, this is all I'll think about and all I'll want to think about. Bless up F.L.U.D.D. I hope they are doing well. I miss the lil dude. They should stop dicking around and make a SM Sunshine 2 already.
One of the positives of a 10 minute unskippable cutscene though is it makes it feel cinematic if you do a decent job of it. The turbulence private plane ride opener with peach, F.L.U.D.D. yapping about how horrible everything is, and Bowser tearing up with his bastard son makes it feel so unnecessarily cinematic it might as well be a movie for me.
Which it is, when people bring up the mario movie, this is all I'll think about and all I'll want to think about. Bless up F.L.U.D.D. I hope they are doing well. I miss the lil dude. They should stop dicking around and make a SM Sunshine 2 already.
2022
Airship Companion
Islets (2022) comes in as an amazing salve to the most prominent tediums of Search Action design: Map Bloat, and backtracking. Search Action is an alternate name to the often touted 'metroidvania' term used more in japan, I prefer it because its contructs include games that share the design rather than aesthetic similarities. For instance, The Legend of Zelda (1986) is a top down search action game. It doesn't take much to see how that game shares a similar function of guided exploration for powerups to 'unlock' more of the map. With that said, certain irritations with the genre have existed since then.
Those who don't know, the original Metroid (1987) didn't even have a map which meant you were bumbling around in the dark looking for the next powerup. In a way, that does create a more survival horror tension to play since it centers caution, however maps have become commonplace since then in an arguably detrimental way. Take Axiom Verge's (2015) Map for reference. You would have to constantly pause and interface with it to figure out where you are and hope that the direction you were trying to go wasn't locked off by a powerup you don't have only to then have to go some other direction when you're wrong. I remember I got so lost trying to navigate it I thought I was (and might have been) softlocked. This is because the way Search Action games are structured are going to stretch out the world, you will have what you already explored but also all this new territory you found, and eventually you find yourself juggling between the two.
This is what I really love about Islets then, its entire premise is exploring different floating islands to try and connect the land as a down on your luck mouse hero. Islets succeeds in making the 'juggling' element of exploration work by first isolating each of the territories from the player until they finish a core mission on the island which then connects them to a previous island with new paths in that connection to explore. This makes the core motivation of play incredibly satisfying because the connection points allow for new roads to travel through and also means that by having several different entrypoints you can do something, usually even the entire connecting mission first, before having to worry about being locked out by not having the right upgrade to explore first.
It's hard to understate just how satisfying this is. In most other games, anything from Elden Ring (2022) to Breath of the Wild (2017) down to more indie titles like Axiom Verge or Blasphemous there is a constant need to pause the game, and search on a map. This actually has made exploration in itself so compulsively map reliant that its become a sort of mental loading time. Not to mention most maps in these games are obviously 1:1 replicas of the environment whereas most cartography would have flourishes or parts that are a bit off (probably partially caused by the fact the fast travel system is backed in). However except for rare deviations these games all share a similar momentum of going forwards. Only diviating back to older sections out of boredom, thereby making the map use automatic. Islets excels here, because when you pause to use the map you are actually charting where to go next, it feels less like being a rat lost in a scientists labyrinth, and more like an adventurer discovering lost last. Combine that with the uniquely bold downtempo music and you have a mellow take on Search Action gameplay, which has been teased at but not promised on.
Part of the reason that promise works is that Islets is a very easy low risk play experience. You lose nothing on death aside a minute at most of walkback, you can fast travel pretty easily and warp back to the last spot in a pinch thus erasing almost all but the most necessary amount of backtracking (which given the form of exploration is almost always changing spots). The currency from killing enemies automatically magnetizes to you from any distance. More importantly, the game is very platforming based because the enemies are frankly just cannon fodder for your arrows to shoot at. You are most likely not going to experience more than a half dozen deaths to almost any boss. Even if you do, there's no walkback for them, since the save point spawns you right before the fight. I actually complained about the lack of walkbacks in these titles in my Blasphemous reflection however the whole energy for this game is oriented towards a chill experience so it wouldn't make sense to punish here, not to mention there's almost no point in trying to prepare ahead of time. All and all the main experience is cashing in on the feeling of satisfaction and constant curiosity fueled progression.
There are a few aspects where I think Islets breaks that sense of immersion. The music for all the bosses is exactly the same 2 songs depending on if you are fighting them from the boat or in the sky. Throughout, you get 15 letters in your mailbox when with how nice the world feels to explore a good sense of it could have been found from doubling that number, since most of the letters are all from one other adventurer who mocks you the whole time. More notably there's constant button prompts for switches and talking to others which I've always said is unnecessary and takes away from the experience. Also, words will pop up if you go too low on health or switch weapons. I think this is my experience with esoteric to solve adventure point and click games like Grim Fandango (1998) and speaking here but I have and will always find these spontaneous prompts, popups, and phrases of character information irritating. They push too much of instrumental play at the cost of immersion. If I could rock no HUD in these, I'd be happily do so. HUD/player warning information gaudiness in general is why Rain World (2017) is on my radar for its more minimalist approach. Also, when you pause the game a timer and a percentage complete modifier greets you, which is so overnormalized in these sidescroller map exploration games. This immediately breaks any trance the experience is trying to set and runs is as a colonizing 'number crunching' experience again. I feel like almost no game every should show a percentage amount until you at least beat the game, it's a hideous little inclusion. This complaints may seem extreme, but all these function as unnecessary distractions to the course of play, and I feel we should be mindful of ways in which extraneous information is a middleman to the player beyond just load screens and front loaded tutorials, which is why I rag on these aspects as much as I do. That said, all these issues run business as usual from me, to the extent I'd be willing to overlook them except for the fact it really stumbles on making the final boss have a Boss Rush section towards the end which reads more as disappointment than chill.
Regardless of my whining the map aspect is so incredibly well realized that it's worth checking out for that reason alone. I haven't felt this refreshed from a narratively light Search Action game, much less one with a lot of map use in a long time. It also helps that unlike what I complained about with Hollow Knight, getting 100% is actually not a chore with all the warp points and an upgrade that lets you see where the level ups are, you are talking at most 10% of the overall experience is poking for these post game collectibles, compared to a more tedious 35%~ that you would usually find in other titles like Axiom Verge or Hollow Knight. Overall I'm really happy I got to chill in the world of Islets for a day, and it's very possible I might come back one day.
If anything else though, you should check out the OST. Soothing with just enough groove that you can listen to them again no problem. Minecraft tunes with a bit more gutso, fits tone perfectly.
Islets (2022) comes in as an amazing salve to the most prominent tediums of Search Action design: Map Bloat, and backtracking. Search Action is an alternate name to the often touted 'metroidvania' term used more in japan, I prefer it because its contructs include games that share the design rather than aesthetic similarities. For instance, The Legend of Zelda (1986) is a top down search action game. It doesn't take much to see how that game shares a similar function of guided exploration for powerups to 'unlock' more of the map. With that said, certain irritations with the genre have existed since then.
Those who don't know, the original Metroid (1987) didn't even have a map which meant you were bumbling around in the dark looking for the next powerup. In a way, that does create a more survival horror tension to play since it centers caution, however maps have become commonplace since then in an arguably detrimental way. Take Axiom Verge's (2015) Map for reference. You would have to constantly pause and interface with it to figure out where you are and hope that the direction you were trying to go wasn't locked off by a powerup you don't have only to then have to go some other direction when you're wrong. I remember I got so lost trying to navigate it I thought I was (and might have been) softlocked. This is because the way Search Action games are structured are going to stretch out the world, you will have what you already explored but also all this new territory you found, and eventually you find yourself juggling between the two.
This is what I really love about Islets then, its entire premise is exploring different floating islands to try and connect the land as a down on your luck mouse hero. Islets succeeds in making the 'juggling' element of exploration work by first isolating each of the territories from the player until they finish a core mission on the island which then connects them to a previous island with new paths in that connection to explore. This makes the core motivation of play incredibly satisfying because the connection points allow for new roads to travel through and also means that by having several different entrypoints you can do something, usually even the entire connecting mission first, before having to worry about being locked out by not having the right upgrade to explore first.
It's hard to understate just how satisfying this is. In most other games, anything from Elden Ring (2022) to Breath of the Wild (2017) down to more indie titles like Axiom Verge or Blasphemous there is a constant need to pause the game, and search on a map. This actually has made exploration in itself so compulsively map reliant that its become a sort of mental loading time. Not to mention most maps in these games are obviously 1:1 replicas of the environment whereas most cartography would have flourishes or parts that are a bit off (probably partially caused by the fact the fast travel system is backed in). However except for rare deviations these games all share a similar momentum of going forwards. Only diviating back to older sections out of boredom, thereby making the map use automatic. Islets excels here, because when you pause to use the map you are actually charting where to go next, it feels less like being a rat lost in a scientists labyrinth, and more like an adventurer discovering lost last. Combine that with the uniquely bold downtempo music and you have a mellow take on Search Action gameplay, which has been teased at but not promised on.
Part of the reason that promise works is that Islets is a very easy low risk play experience. You lose nothing on death aside a minute at most of walkback, you can fast travel pretty easily and warp back to the last spot in a pinch thus erasing almost all but the most necessary amount of backtracking (which given the form of exploration is almost always changing spots). The currency from killing enemies automatically magnetizes to you from any distance. More importantly, the game is very platforming based because the enemies are frankly just cannon fodder for your arrows to shoot at. You are most likely not going to experience more than a half dozen deaths to almost any boss. Even if you do, there's no walkback for them, since the save point spawns you right before the fight. I actually complained about the lack of walkbacks in these titles in my Blasphemous reflection however the whole energy for this game is oriented towards a chill experience so it wouldn't make sense to punish here, not to mention there's almost no point in trying to prepare ahead of time. All and all the main experience is cashing in on the feeling of satisfaction and constant curiosity fueled progression.
There are a few aspects where I think Islets breaks that sense of immersion. The music for all the bosses is exactly the same 2 songs depending on if you are fighting them from the boat or in the sky. Throughout, you get 15 letters in your mailbox when with how nice the world feels to explore a good sense of it could have been found from doubling that number, since most of the letters are all from one other adventurer who mocks you the whole time. More notably there's constant button prompts for switches and talking to others which I've always said is unnecessary and takes away from the experience. Also, words will pop up if you go too low on health or switch weapons. I think this is my experience with esoteric to solve adventure point and click games like Grim Fandango (1998) and speaking here but I have and will always find these spontaneous prompts, popups, and phrases of character information irritating. They push too much of instrumental play at the cost of immersion. If I could rock no HUD in these, I'd be happily do so. HUD/player warning information gaudiness in general is why Rain World (2017) is on my radar for its more minimalist approach. Also, when you pause the game a timer and a percentage complete modifier greets you, which is so overnormalized in these sidescroller map exploration games. This immediately breaks any trance the experience is trying to set and runs is as a colonizing 'number crunching' experience again. I feel like almost no game every should show a percentage amount until you at least beat the game, it's a hideous little inclusion. This complaints may seem extreme, but all these function as unnecessary distractions to the course of play, and I feel we should be mindful of ways in which extraneous information is a middleman to the player beyond just load screens and front loaded tutorials, which is why I rag on these aspects as much as I do. That said, all these issues run business as usual from me, to the extent I'd be willing to overlook them except for the fact it really stumbles on making the final boss have a Boss Rush section towards the end which reads more as disappointment than chill.
Regardless of my whining the map aspect is so incredibly well realized that it's worth checking out for that reason alone. I haven't felt this refreshed from a narratively light Search Action game, much less one with a lot of map use in a long time. It also helps that unlike what I complained about with Hollow Knight, getting 100% is actually not a chore with all the warp points and an upgrade that lets you see where the level ups are, you are talking at most 10% of the overall experience is poking for these post game collectibles, compared to a more tedious 35%~ that you would usually find in other titles like Axiom Verge or Hollow Knight. Overall I'm really happy I got to chill in the world of Islets for a day, and it's very possible I might come back one day.
If anything else though, you should check out the OST. Soothing with just enough groove that you can listen to them again no problem. Minecraft tunes with a bit more gutso, fits tone perfectly.
"My every action, observed, recorded, analyzed. The place was the proof every paranoiac dreams of." - Max Payne
I cant believe this super controversial game that has its own Wikipedia Page has been played by nobody on here but me considering its playable on Newgrounds right now. There's no strategy to it at all and its not even that gorey. It's actually pretty cute in terms of violence and messaging by today's standards this shit came out only 5 years after DOOM (1997) to put it in perspective. There's nothing here that you probably havent seen before, the character isn't even a racial stereotype in the way that the same devs Detroit Cop series is (though noticably arabic). This is a nothingburger that the creator made just to be part of the conversation and presumably bug people talking about it by looking at the description
"IF YOU'VE SEEN OR READ ANYTHING ABOUT THIS GAME LATELY PLEASE E-MAIL ME ABOUT IT. MOST OF THE TIME I AM UNAWARE OF WHO'S BITCHING ABOUT IT."
This combined with the other racist shit from this guy makes me think this is just a paperweight to harrass and rag on random people talking about it so in a way I like the fact that nobody in 2023 is even bothering to take the bait.
Just be mindful, thats what most of this shit is. Shlock fodder intentionally created to start flame wars and rile people up to then rag on them with their fanatic cronies. You could call it the 'alt right' strategy, or 'chud' behaviour but I think this attitude is more vulgar than that, its not nearly that planned. It's the cliquey avarice that pulses the spirit of empire, riling peoples sensibilities up and away from the real problem in this rotten megacity and the squalid festering ratrace happening in the margins, desperate for a kick up the ladder.
"None of you understand. I'm not locked up in here with you. You're locked up in here with me." - Rorsach
I cant believe this super controversial game that has its own Wikipedia Page has been played by nobody on here but me considering its playable on Newgrounds right now. There's no strategy to it at all and its not even that gorey. It's actually pretty cute in terms of violence and messaging by today's standards this shit came out only 5 years after DOOM (1997) to put it in perspective. There's nothing here that you probably havent seen before, the character isn't even a racial stereotype in the way that the same devs Detroit Cop series is (though noticably arabic). This is a nothingburger that the creator made just to be part of the conversation and presumably bug people talking about it by looking at the description
"IF YOU'VE SEEN OR READ ANYTHING ABOUT THIS GAME LATELY PLEASE E-MAIL ME ABOUT IT. MOST OF THE TIME I AM UNAWARE OF WHO'S BITCHING ABOUT IT."
This combined with the other racist shit from this guy makes me think this is just a paperweight to harrass and rag on random people talking about it so in a way I like the fact that nobody in 2023 is even bothering to take the bait.
Just be mindful, thats what most of this shit is. Shlock fodder intentionally created to start flame wars and rile people up to then rag on them with their fanatic cronies. You could call it the 'alt right' strategy, or 'chud' behaviour but I think this attitude is more vulgar than that, its not nearly that planned. It's the cliquey avarice that pulses the spirit of empire, riling peoples sensibilities up and away from the real problem in this rotten megacity and the squalid festering ratrace happening in the margins, desperate for a kick up the ladder.
"None of you understand. I'm not locked up in here with you. You're locked up in here with me." - Rorsach
2011
Coin Companion
In a way, Super Mario 3D Land (2011) exudes as a class act in why historical familiarity of what lineage a recent work is actually building off of is useful context for assessment. What I mean is that Super Mario 3D World (2013, or 2023 depending on port) is clearly a direct continuation on the approach in this one but when I wrote my post on it I ignored the information I hadn't interfaced with to instead draw the point of influences from Super Mario Bros. 3 (1988) which thereby stressed the excess of coins, gambling machines, weak boss engagements, etc.
While I think that the reflection holds water just fine without playing this one, its become a situation where the most frustrating aspects of 3D World become less acceptable. For instance, the Bosses in 3D Land have hazard variations during the fights, flame pits etc. The 7th stage boss actually throws 2 separate boss encounters at the player at the same time. Once we get to 3D World this aspect is removed for seemingly no reason. On the other hand, most of the iterations I applauded 3D World for actually started here. For instance, the rather large post game as well as the 'pity help' Invincibility Leaf are both concepts that were externalized properly in 3D Land. Unfortunately the main takeaway here is it makes the ease of the flat plain boss encounters in 3D World downright unacceptable, you fight every boss in that game 3 separate times and there's nothing to make them more difficult than last time. It's even the same 2 Bowser Jr. kids! They could have literally just self plagiarized the layouts from Land point blank and it would have been more interesting so its frustrating and bizarre that they didn't to the point it makes me depreciate those games remarkably more.
I don't think I'm quite as guilty of malpractice as I make it sound because after pondering it for a while I think the 'bad' naming conventions may be a way for Nintendo to basically launder its own products and create the illusion of the improvement towards some sort of ubermench supergame when in reality they are recycling their old ideas with a new coat of paint. There's something to be said about how not tacking a number on the end actually does manifest them more as art than as disposable products. There's a mildly funny meme that goes 'If sex is so good where is sex 2' but becomes funnier when you recognize this is a format that is only popular in gaming. The sequel to the Iliad (8th Cent. BCE) is not 'Illiad 2' it's The Oddysey. Ditto for Shakespeare, etc. So in that way I think Nintendo and Sega walking away from numerological conventions is a good thing, but we can't pretend that the increase in title jank like New Super Luigi U (2013) operates as anything other than an artifice to confuse potential consumers into the historical lineage because it would unmask that the companies behind it are running out of quickly marketable ideas.
If I timed my word count properly, the Coin Companion should be about finished speaking now so its up to you if you want to loop it or keep it off assuming you didn't turn it off within the first 3 minutes. It's very annoying isn't it? Well, I choose it for the point of accuracy, because its what happens apparently in a Mario title like 3D Land if you take away a score counter and replace it with coins. The hyper inflation of coins is not only grating it also trivializes most of how you engage with the levels. For instance trying to get higher on the pole at the end or do the 5 red coin challenges only reward you with a 1 Up, thereby making them only intrinsically motivated goals because the inflation in play is such that by world 5 you will have raked up so many coins to have somewhere in the ball park of 40 - 60 lives regardless of your skill level. Lives were already perfunctory in Mario games past the point of the Game and Watch to NES era but here they become so inflated as to make almost nothing in the level aside from the exit meaningful. For the record this probably does explain why World reintroduced score but I still hold to the point that the real approach is to use star bits instead with the ability to feed those star lumas for levels. Along with the currently substantiated 3 coins that you pick up so that everything in a level moves towards new unlockable level (hell you even still have a touchpad in both games to point and feed them with). This may seem like a paltry reward, but as Land's own structure shows, unlocking new levels is supposed to be its own reward. Which is fair actually, it worked for Mario Galaxy (2010) so there's no reason in theory it wouldn't work elsewise as long as the player is enjoying the game and wants to see more.
If its not obvious by now, I did not enjoy the game and now that I've hit the post game content I don't want to see more. There's a few reasons for this I haven't mentioned yet. For one, the depth perception for landing jumps is far more awkward, not particularly helped by the fact the camera is pointed mostly down at the player so it makes it hard to see gaps forwards unless you walk. On top of this the main appeal of Land is supposed to be as a way to show off the 3D effects of the 3DS, which to be fair, its not nothing, its a pretty cool effect as long as you line your eyesight up with the device in a perfect perpedicular angle, but the Binoculars that you can stop and look through actively expose the weakness of the technology the moment you move around: if you aren't looking perpedicular the effect is garrishly disorienting. As if youre glasses fell off in the middle of a traffic stop with everything blurring up and looking hideous. More particularly, you can't play as Peach in this game, and shes made a sexist trope as per usual in this one. Worse than usual because in the picture letters between levels shes crossing her eyes a lot. She has so little autonomy in this one it borders on the expectations you'd get for those fetish porn mobile games. It's absurd, they have pink ribbons around the cage and in every cutscene all she yells is 'mario' and all Mario does is his strained wahoos and yipees that made me want to chop out his tongue and cook it as a delicatessen for Bowser.
Peach sexism would be heinous on its own, but it's even worse here because I realized in the course of play as Mario that trying to actually land jumps without a float mechanic to give control in the air is miserable. If you don't have the Tanuki suit on, you're going to fall off and die from an inability to assess how far your limited movement can take you. My guess is that if you aren't playing as Peach in 3D World its almost equally miserable, but at least in that one you can blow up the screen more to a whole TV to get a sense of your jump length and also there's enough camera variation and general spectacle to keep it at bay.
Now that I've bloated the length of this piece to the point only the regulars are going to read I'm going to unveil my true extremism: Peach supremacy. Mario has fallen off since 64, his long jump isn't nearly as good anymore, hes old and weak and unlikable. He should retire. Everything that makes the 3D games good is a sense of control which is why high level 64 play feels so satisfying. In Sunshine he 'crossdresses' via peach's float with the help of F.L.U.D.D. but then abandoned that once he realized the public wouldn't like him for it. Meanwhile he and Bowser maintain a sexist dowry over Peach which she openly flaunted against at the end of Odyssey. In every game where you play as Peach shes far more entertaining and satisfying on both a mechanical and story level. The sections in Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door were way more interesting for instance. Also, she's a go to character to play in Double Dash until you unlock Toadette, because the Heart power is sleeper good. If Nintendo is going to put off their announcements due to the death of the queen, they should just go full monarchist and respect their own queen and free her! I have retroactively decided every Mainline Mario title between Sunshine up to Bowser's Fury is bad if there is no Peach gaming and that every game where you play as Peach clears. I also will now agknowledge every Sunday as the Day of Peach. Now I must write another paragraph to hide this rampant monarchist support from the public in case they decide to just skip to the last paragraph to 'get the jist'.
All in all I think 3D Land exposed to me a latent point that is always worth keeping in mind: Game Companies are constantly borrowing their own ideas and pretending otherwise for the illusion of novelty. It's probably better to check the historicity of what has directly inspired a work before writing a large critique on one game over the others and, to that effect, is a tacit reason why going through a franchise in order of release might be a good idea. Therefore if I ever talk about Zelda or Metroid games you better believe I'm going to try and play them in chronological order so I have enough familiarity to say what has been added and what hasn't. Perhaps ditto with every franchise, we will see though.
In a way, Super Mario 3D Land (2011) exudes as a class act in why historical familiarity of what lineage a recent work is actually building off of is useful context for assessment. What I mean is that Super Mario 3D World (2013, or 2023 depending on port) is clearly a direct continuation on the approach in this one but when I wrote my post on it I ignored the information I hadn't interfaced with to instead draw the point of influences from Super Mario Bros. 3 (1988) which thereby stressed the excess of coins, gambling machines, weak boss engagements, etc.
While I think that the reflection holds water just fine without playing this one, its become a situation where the most frustrating aspects of 3D World become less acceptable. For instance, the Bosses in 3D Land have hazard variations during the fights, flame pits etc. The 7th stage boss actually throws 2 separate boss encounters at the player at the same time. Once we get to 3D World this aspect is removed for seemingly no reason. On the other hand, most of the iterations I applauded 3D World for actually started here. For instance, the rather large post game as well as the 'pity help' Invincibility Leaf are both concepts that were externalized properly in 3D Land. Unfortunately the main takeaway here is it makes the ease of the flat plain boss encounters in 3D World downright unacceptable, you fight every boss in that game 3 separate times and there's nothing to make them more difficult than last time. It's even the same 2 Bowser Jr. kids! They could have literally just self plagiarized the layouts from Land point blank and it would have been more interesting so its frustrating and bizarre that they didn't to the point it makes me depreciate those games remarkably more.
I don't think I'm quite as guilty of malpractice as I make it sound because after pondering it for a while I think the 'bad' naming conventions may be a way for Nintendo to basically launder its own products and create the illusion of the improvement towards some sort of ubermench supergame when in reality they are recycling their old ideas with a new coat of paint. There's something to be said about how not tacking a number on the end actually does manifest them more as art than as disposable products. There's a mildly funny meme that goes 'If sex is so good where is sex 2' but becomes funnier when you recognize this is a format that is only popular in gaming. The sequel to the Iliad (8th Cent. BCE) is not 'Illiad 2' it's The Oddysey. Ditto for Shakespeare, etc. So in that way I think Nintendo and Sega walking away from numerological conventions is a good thing, but we can't pretend that the increase in title jank like New Super Luigi U (2013) operates as anything other than an artifice to confuse potential consumers into the historical lineage because it would unmask that the companies behind it are running out of quickly marketable ideas.
If I timed my word count properly, the Coin Companion should be about finished speaking now so its up to you if you want to loop it or keep it off assuming you didn't turn it off within the first 3 minutes. It's very annoying isn't it? Well, I choose it for the point of accuracy, because its what happens apparently in a Mario title like 3D Land if you take away a score counter and replace it with coins. The hyper inflation of coins is not only grating it also trivializes most of how you engage with the levels. For instance trying to get higher on the pole at the end or do the 5 red coin challenges only reward you with a 1 Up, thereby making them only intrinsically motivated goals because the inflation in play is such that by world 5 you will have raked up so many coins to have somewhere in the ball park of 40 - 60 lives regardless of your skill level. Lives were already perfunctory in Mario games past the point of the Game and Watch to NES era but here they become so inflated as to make almost nothing in the level aside from the exit meaningful. For the record this probably does explain why World reintroduced score but I still hold to the point that the real approach is to use star bits instead with the ability to feed those star lumas for levels. Along with the currently substantiated 3 coins that you pick up so that everything in a level moves towards new unlockable level (hell you even still have a touchpad in both games to point and feed them with). This may seem like a paltry reward, but as Land's own structure shows, unlocking new levels is supposed to be its own reward. Which is fair actually, it worked for Mario Galaxy (2010) so there's no reason in theory it wouldn't work elsewise as long as the player is enjoying the game and wants to see more.
If its not obvious by now, I did not enjoy the game and now that I've hit the post game content I don't want to see more. There's a few reasons for this I haven't mentioned yet. For one, the depth perception for landing jumps is far more awkward, not particularly helped by the fact the camera is pointed mostly down at the player so it makes it hard to see gaps forwards unless you walk. On top of this the main appeal of Land is supposed to be as a way to show off the 3D effects of the 3DS, which to be fair, its not nothing, its a pretty cool effect as long as you line your eyesight up with the device in a perfect perpedicular angle, but the Binoculars that you can stop and look through actively expose the weakness of the technology the moment you move around: if you aren't looking perpedicular the effect is garrishly disorienting. As if youre glasses fell off in the middle of a traffic stop with everything blurring up and looking hideous. More particularly, you can't play as Peach in this game, and shes made a sexist trope as per usual in this one. Worse than usual because in the picture letters between levels shes crossing her eyes a lot. She has so little autonomy in this one it borders on the expectations you'd get for those fetish porn mobile games. It's absurd, they have pink ribbons around the cage and in every cutscene all she yells is 'mario' and all Mario does is his strained wahoos and yipees that made me want to chop out his tongue and cook it as a delicatessen for Bowser.
Peach sexism would be heinous on its own, but it's even worse here because I realized in the course of play as Mario that trying to actually land jumps without a float mechanic to give control in the air is miserable. If you don't have the Tanuki suit on, you're going to fall off and die from an inability to assess how far your limited movement can take you. My guess is that if you aren't playing as Peach in 3D World its almost equally miserable, but at least in that one you can blow up the screen more to a whole TV to get a sense of your jump length and also there's enough camera variation and general spectacle to keep it at bay.
Now that I've bloated the length of this piece to the point only the regulars are going to read I'm going to unveil my true extremism: Peach supremacy. Mario has fallen off since 64, his long jump isn't nearly as good anymore, hes old and weak and unlikable. He should retire. Everything that makes the 3D games good is a sense of control which is why high level 64 play feels so satisfying. In Sunshine he 'crossdresses' via peach's float with the help of F.L.U.D.D. but then abandoned that once he realized the public wouldn't like him for it. Meanwhile he and Bowser maintain a sexist dowry over Peach which she openly flaunted against at the end of Odyssey. In every game where you play as Peach shes far more entertaining and satisfying on both a mechanical and story level. The sections in Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door were way more interesting for instance. Also, she's a go to character to play in Double Dash until you unlock Toadette, because the Heart power is sleeper good. If Nintendo is going to put off their announcements due to the death of the queen, they should just go full monarchist and respect their own queen and free her! I have retroactively decided every Mainline Mario title between Sunshine up to Bowser's Fury is bad if there is no Peach gaming and that every game where you play as Peach clears. I also will now agknowledge every Sunday as the Day of Peach. Now I must write another paragraph to hide this rampant monarchist support from the public in case they decide to just skip to the last paragraph to 'get the jist'.
All in all I think 3D Land exposed to me a latent point that is always worth keeping in mind: Game Companies are constantly borrowing their own ideas and pretending otherwise for the illusion of novelty. It's probably better to check the historicity of what has directly inspired a work before writing a large critique on one game over the others and, to that effect, is a tacit reason why going through a franchise in order of release might be a good idea. Therefore if I ever talk about Zelda or Metroid games you better believe I'm going to try and play them in chronological order so I have enough familiarity to say what has been added and what hasn't. Perhaps ditto with every franchise, we will see though.
TV Companion
Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse (2013) is an ambitious platform mascot remake of a 1990 Sega Genesis release by the same name. In principle, this sort of title should be absolutely unlikable for me. You play as an over confidant and commercially monolithic protagonist who has too much corporate mascot baggage to be relatable. You have this constant narration saying ultimately redundant things. You have the dissonance between the bosses being a touch too difficult and the platforming being a touch too easy, making it feel less satisfying for its supposed target audience, kids. An admittedly sexist dowry mission motivation where you have to save the damsel in distress Minnie from an evil witch trying to steal her beauty. On top of all of that, its also a remake, and as a bit of an art purist I tend to find these fanfiction reanimations of the original work to be disappointing. Yet, as I've grown older I've learned that this automatic repulsion of licensed games and simple narratives is not doing anybody any favors.
There is unquestionably a lot here to like. Each of the 5 levels are creative and constantly have you moving between 3D micromanagement platforming, and satisfyingly 2D jump sections. Each of the levels are totally unique. You have the enchanted forest of confusion, the library with books and letters coming alive, and an absolutely gorgeous candy world. Making it feel like the famous Thru the Mirror (1936) episode come to life. The game overall is short enough you could beat over an hours cup of tea but has a teaming amount of variety for how you interact with each level that it never feels monotnous. In my minds eye I was thinking of games like Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards (2000) and Klonoa (1997) where the world is 3D and you have to often deal with attacks coming in from the background, there is some of that here with the Library section where you have to avoid the books protruding in from the background and the general variety for how the boss engagements are all attacking from different angles.1 However this is one order of magnitude even more impressive as it seamlessly moves the entire gameplay to 3D as well. If you remember those pipe sections from Super Mario Odyssey (2017) imagine if those were longer and not actually segmented via pipes, imagine instead that you just got to a point in the stage and the camera switch to you allowing to walk away. This is most felt at the beginning of the game when you walk into the castle and during a boss fight against a candy dragon where you have to jump between platforms.
The reason I feel compelled to talk about this is that I feel like by admitting that this game is fun and has a lot of variety I'm betraying something by admitting for instance that I'd much rather replay this over something like Cuphead. The lack of monotonous play is something that I believe this game successfully taps into, and admittedly something that the early Fantasia (1940) era cartoons tapped into as well. You'd never know if when you put an early disney cartoon on if it was going to be a tornado storm like The Little Whirlwind (1941) or a car breaking down like in Tire Trouble (1943) but you knew that when you watched it you were never going to be bored due to the fact you were watching honed in and unique animations in action. That's what Castle taps into, and as a game the trust of the experience works better in terms of this variety power fantasy for making me want to improve. By allowing for the game to be ultimately quite short, it builds into itself a much firmer desire to improve and replay the experience which works far better for Mickey because his whole deal is just barely avoiding being hit. I much prefer this to the high octane performance expectations of a difficult SHMUP or Cuphead. This is the design approach that I believe you can find in kirby games, where the power fantasy is being able to experience the dream again with better immunity. The point of Sakurai's early Kirby titles like Kirby's Dream Land (1992) is that the world is constantly changing yet keeping the game is short enough that you can try to play it through taking less damage. The cartoon approach to game creation. Unfortunately later Kirby games would bloat with powerups that trivialize the boss encounters and mandatorially long play times to satisfying the player, which is why I think its important not to just throw this game away out of hand. If you were to ask me I think this creative flavour is nessecary in order to keep a platformer to feel satisfying, and I think that how short is it is a strength and rather than a weakness.
There's actually only a few nuanced spots where I think Castle drops the ball. The main one is the narrator. They did a great job of making sure the narrators vocal intrusions are not annnoying by making the voice actor yawn out the lines like a lion, but especially after you beat a boss you can actually cut his delivery off. Outside of that, the score meter in this game has a problem, for one I don't think it needed to be there at all to begin with since my ideal way of scoring better is by being hit less times and losing less lives, but even aside from that its a mandatory inclusion at the center top of the screen with an extra couple digits added to the scoreboard so that you will always see zeros next to whatever your score is, implicitly telling the player they are not doing well enough. My ideal way to do this would be to hide those extra digits until you hit that next numbers place entirely (ie going from 000099990 -> 000100000 being worse than 99990 -> 100000), as I think push everything towards 'scoreboards' is why we've ended up now with the rather unfortunate situation of 'ranking' the players performance by in game metrics rather than letting those metrics speak for themselves like in DOOM or even allowing the player to even count them themselves like personally tallying how many times you fell off the stage in Spyro. I feel like suppressing and reorienting the players urges like this is similar to bolding, all capsing, or highlighting words in a post. I hope you've noticed that I try to do italicizations and these other various touch ups very rarely in my posts because I think it just calls too much attention to itself and creates a sense of artifice that commands too much the takeaway to the player. Just as repeating your statements too much in an essay comes off as redundant and insecure, I think there's an argument to be made that we could view stuff like score upon a similar formal line.
Regardless of that Castle is similar to early Kirby or my recent post on Bowser's Fury in the sense that this focus on the shortness of the length allows the player to feel more satisfied than a compulsorily large amount of content. It's the power fantasy I seek for in a platformer. This title excellently hones in on the feeling of constant spectacle and variation in those early cartoons. If I want to feel powerful and cool and a drive to get even better while being refreshed by the initial experience, this is the type of platformer I prefer. It's a shame that the sexist narrative and the occasional blip in the performance prevents it from standing out, but I think this is the basepoint for what I expect and want from a platformer, all aspects accounted for.
Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse (2013) is an ambitious platform mascot remake of a 1990 Sega Genesis release by the same name. In principle, this sort of title should be absolutely unlikable for me. You play as an over confidant and commercially monolithic protagonist who has too much corporate mascot baggage to be relatable. You have this constant narration saying ultimately redundant things. You have the dissonance between the bosses being a touch too difficult and the platforming being a touch too easy, making it feel less satisfying for its supposed target audience, kids. An admittedly sexist dowry mission motivation where you have to save the damsel in distress Minnie from an evil witch trying to steal her beauty. On top of all of that, its also a remake, and as a bit of an art purist I tend to find these fanfiction reanimations of the original work to be disappointing. Yet, as I've grown older I've learned that this automatic repulsion of licensed games and simple narratives is not doing anybody any favors.
There is unquestionably a lot here to like. Each of the 5 levels are creative and constantly have you moving between 3D micromanagement platforming, and satisfyingly 2D jump sections. Each of the levels are totally unique. You have the enchanted forest of confusion, the library with books and letters coming alive, and an absolutely gorgeous candy world. Making it feel like the famous Thru the Mirror (1936) episode come to life. The game overall is short enough you could beat over an hours cup of tea but has a teaming amount of variety for how you interact with each level that it never feels monotnous. In my minds eye I was thinking of games like Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards (2000) and Klonoa (1997) where the world is 3D and you have to often deal with attacks coming in from the background, there is some of that here with the Library section where you have to avoid the books protruding in from the background and the general variety for how the boss engagements are all attacking from different angles.1 However this is one order of magnitude even more impressive as it seamlessly moves the entire gameplay to 3D as well. If you remember those pipe sections from Super Mario Odyssey (2017) imagine if those were longer and not actually segmented via pipes, imagine instead that you just got to a point in the stage and the camera switch to you allowing to walk away. This is most felt at the beginning of the game when you walk into the castle and during a boss fight against a candy dragon where you have to jump between platforms.
The reason I feel compelled to talk about this is that I feel like by admitting that this game is fun and has a lot of variety I'm betraying something by admitting for instance that I'd much rather replay this over something like Cuphead. The lack of monotonous play is something that I believe this game successfully taps into, and admittedly something that the early Fantasia (1940) era cartoons tapped into as well. You'd never know if when you put an early disney cartoon on if it was going to be a tornado storm like The Little Whirlwind (1941) or a car breaking down like in Tire Trouble (1943) but you knew that when you watched it you were never going to be bored due to the fact you were watching honed in and unique animations in action. That's what Castle taps into, and as a game the trust of the experience works better in terms of this variety power fantasy for making me want to improve. By allowing for the game to be ultimately quite short, it builds into itself a much firmer desire to improve and replay the experience which works far better for Mickey because his whole deal is just barely avoiding being hit. I much prefer this to the high octane performance expectations of a difficult SHMUP or Cuphead. This is the design approach that I believe you can find in kirby games, where the power fantasy is being able to experience the dream again with better immunity. The point of Sakurai's early Kirby titles like Kirby's Dream Land (1992) is that the world is constantly changing yet keeping the game is short enough that you can try to play it through taking less damage. The cartoon approach to game creation. Unfortunately later Kirby games would bloat with powerups that trivialize the boss encounters and mandatorially long play times to satisfying the player, which is why I think its important not to just throw this game away out of hand. If you were to ask me I think this creative flavour is nessecary in order to keep a platformer to feel satisfying, and I think that how short is it is a strength and rather than a weakness.
There's actually only a few nuanced spots where I think Castle drops the ball. The main one is the narrator. They did a great job of making sure the narrators vocal intrusions are not annnoying by making the voice actor yawn out the lines like a lion, but especially after you beat a boss you can actually cut his delivery off. Outside of that, the score meter in this game has a problem, for one I don't think it needed to be there at all to begin with since my ideal way of scoring better is by being hit less times and losing less lives, but even aside from that its a mandatory inclusion at the center top of the screen with an extra couple digits added to the scoreboard so that you will always see zeros next to whatever your score is, implicitly telling the player they are not doing well enough. My ideal way to do this would be to hide those extra digits until you hit that next numbers place entirely (ie going from 000099990 -> 000100000 being worse than 99990 -> 100000), as I think push everything towards 'scoreboards' is why we've ended up now with the rather unfortunate situation of 'ranking' the players performance by in game metrics rather than letting those metrics speak for themselves like in DOOM or even allowing the player to even count them themselves like personally tallying how many times you fell off the stage in Spyro. I feel like suppressing and reorienting the players urges like this is similar to bolding, all capsing, or highlighting words in a post. I hope you've noticed that I try to do italicizations and these other various touch ups very rarely in my posts because I think it just calls too much attention to itself and creates a sense of artifice that commands too much the takeaway to the player. Just as repeating your statements too much in an essay comes off as redundant and insecure, I think there's an argument to be made that we could view stuff like score upon a similar formal line.
Regardless of that Castle is similar to early Kirby or my recent post on Bowser's Fury in the sense that this focus on the shortness of the length allows the player to feel more satisfied than a compulsorily large amount of content. It's the power fantasy I seek for in a platformer. This title excellently hones in on the feeling of constant spectacle and variation in those early cartoons. If I want to feel powerful and cool and a drive to get even better while being refreshed by the initial experience, this is the type of platformer I prefer. It's a shame that the sexist narrative and the occasional blip in the performance prevents it from standing out, but I think this is the basepoint for what I expect and want from a platformer, all aspects accounted for.
2017
CN: Shower Thought
Bookshelf Companion
"As all partings foreshadow the great final one, so, empty rooms, bereft of a familiar presence, mournfully whisper what your room and what mine must one day be. " - Charles Dickens, Bleak House
About a month ago I moved out of my parents house for the first time, and I just want to say I'm very glad I played this first before I moved out because I absolutely would have done what the text here depicts. In Minimalist (2017) you pick everything up to get rid of it, and then you are left with an empty space afterwards.
For a very short time period in 2018 I fell into a few different rabbit holes. I was out as a girl to most of my online friends but still struggling to convince the rest of the irl population I was (depressingly, I still deal with this). Most of those rabbit holes are rather dark, Otakudom, Scientism, interest in reactionary arguments (ie the peterson religiousity trap, skepticism of NB people, etc.). These are all terrible, there was a lot to like about me in this time and I wasn't some horrific bigot but I was a dumb suburban white girl with no political compass. A seemingly more benign interest was in the Minimalist movement, as a lifestyle and aesthetic. A mixture of literal CEO mindset shit like wearing only 1 shirt, and living space decisions like abandoning as much furniture and extraneous shit in your life as you can. I watched stupid ass movies like Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things (2016) on netflix. Consume a bunch of youtube videos which were an aggregate of Tiny House glorification, lifestyle aesthetic videos that showed bedrooms as if they were hospital chambers, and a touch of 'minimalist philosophy' like thinking Diogenes of Sinope was the only good philosopher because of his dedication to 'minimalism'. To illustrate here's a genuine excerpt of what I said from around the time to my girlfriend in support of how I have a smaller rating scale:
"Like in my opinion I've started realizing that minimalism is more or less how I already operate
I'm all about trying to focus on 'good' art, 'good' people (though that can be a tad more complex), etc.
Minimalism is all about trying to focus on what you like, what's helping you in life
Trying to enjoy that, and then discarding the clutter"
In retrospect this plays right into the insecurity about having 'good mental hygeine'. You see it all the time in reflexive anti consumerist sentiments. Later that same year I would buy a bunch of 'girly clothes' and throw a good 3/4ths of my boy wardrobe in the trash. 'Thats it, I dont need anymore things'. This seemed like a logical step of maturity from understanding how my family threw away all the gamecube game boxes and put it in a giant CD case. They even threw away the gamecube itself because logically, the Wii can run all that stuff now anyway. While I heavily disagree with doing that now, at the time I thought well thats minimalism isnt it, no need to keep plastic trash around the house. The problem is that logical next step would be to throw away every game disc for the playstation or xbox since the computer can technically run it. Why not take this 'digital nomadism' to its logical extreme? Why have any objects at all?
...
Well, it's not like I had some profound realization from playing Minimalist, by this point a half decade later I already recognized how silly and empty it is to have no furniture. Hell, if anything woke me up to it its probably the opening of Cruelty Squad (2021) which depicts just how pathetic and depressed doing that actually is. However, Minimalist did make me recognize that I probably shouldn't just abandon everything. I brought some books I loved from before I left, I haven't touched them at all because I read most of my books online but its nice to know that they are there just in case. More importantly, I had panicked about how many loads of laundry I have to do and that I should trash 3/4ths of it again, but this jolted me from following up on that.
More broadly, Minimalist is short and small, to the point its almost unsatisfying. These 'one room' bitsy games are, by accident or intentionally in direct commentary with the first ever bitsy game released Where did I put it? (2016) by Patrick Hale. In which you explore your small space to find something abstract you lost in messy home. Here, its inverted to be an attempt to lose everything. To lose the ego attached to 'objects' rather than trying to find it. Here's what I think is clever though, there's an emptiness in BOTH texts due to a lack of an ending. In one you find out what you're missing but never find it properly, theres no end credit loop like in other bitsy games. Here, you lose that, but you also lose the ability to prompt any more dialogue boxes since you just got rid of all the objects by interacting with them. In Where did I put it? you can technically loop the dialogue thoughts forever in an infernal mindtrap, here you have the opposite, the infernal mindtrap in not having mental prompts.
Every time you choose to own or release an object from your home, you're making an implicit decision of 'memory' just as much as of identity. Having an object anchored lets you remember what you had, so the allure of digitizing all of these memories into the computer makes sense in theory but the problem is the complexity of it never quite goes away. In 2020 or so I lost every single piece of memory stored on my computer. The reaction images, pictures of discussions I had with my ex, etc. It was devastating. Made worse by the fact I just broke up at the time with her and found out that my old discussions with her in Skype are lost to time. At least my version of skype, I lost everything. In a way this is privileged, because most people have more serious versions of this that are marginalized. Being kicked out suddenly from their home, having an abuser destroy their objects, having to flee in a war. By that reasoning, I've come into this realization of memory in its relationship to objects a little late.
On the literary level, I always knew it was there. Yet never really wanted to accept it personally, because I'm a 'digital girl'. However as both these texts accurately represent there is no real distinction between physical hoarding and digital hoarding in both how objects can arrest you and in how 'freeing' from them is just as solemn. I could just as easy consider these databases a form of memory hoarding. At any moment I could panic about how I 'dont remember anything' and try to frantically categorize what I played, listened to, and watched. I've experienced so much art at 25 that its running that panic of incoherent clutter, and odds are if you're reading this the same is likely true for you to. I'm failing in for instance movie trivia and constantly feeling I need to play catch up and create flash cards, only to then simplify it. One day I'll spend trying to categorize every 3D platformer I've played and want to play, the next I'll say to myself 'ok fuck it, only 3D mario matters now or whatever'. Do you remember everything? Or do you like me often find yourself checking quietly in a tab to make sure you're getting the information right? How good is your recall? What is really forgettable to you and how do you organize the stuff you want to remember?
Anyway, I could waffle about this all day to no fruition, but instead I want to just point out something. In Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy (2001) you have long voice acted cinematic conversations with the NPCs to move the story along, they are entertaining and endearing. However when you try to speak to them after they tell you what to do, they simply will not talk to you or repeat themselves. They'll tell you basically to leave them alone and go do this. The first time this happens its surprising, because the norm is that you should be able to talk to the dialogue givers for repeat information whenever you want. Similarly to expectations, a person who has played a lot of early JRPGs and point and click games, are going to find the lack of objects you can look at and get dialogue from in Chrono Trigger equally suprising. Yet in both these games it makes sense to do without even though it leaves behind an 'eeriness' for the player. The player being forced to either remember or recognize that they are bothering is more immersive. These 2 games, Minimalist and Where did I put it are not immersive by comparison, they comment on videogame form itself. It's limitations and how those limitations can reflect onto the player. See, this comment response the author left on the page is in my view the real ending.
"Thanks! I wanted the 'end' of the game to be a time to reflect, since there's literally nothing left to do since you've willingly got rid of everything you own. I felt like explicitly stating the character's reasoning to the player would detract from the player coming to their own conclusion. Yours is totally valid, but others might have thought of something else- maybe the character is going off to become a monk? :)"
The real end game is being so distressed that you try to interact with the creator to find a catharsis for the fiction to make sense. Because the 'ending' of the game in the text is so unreal that you cant ever feel certain its really there. After playing enough bitsy games now I've realized not having an ending is just a running bit between these people, probably a satirical response to the 'looping' thats built into the engine when it does end. You'll have to find closure somewhere else. Yet outside of this we should be comfortable with the prospect that we might just be missing the conclusion, or that there never was one in the first place. Not every memory exists to be recalled evenly, and not every game exists to be concluded upon. It's both the great curse and the benefit of gaming as an art form that it brings with it an ambiguity of intentions and expected results. Sometimes its better to just be at peace with it, for instance there was never any 'conclusive' aspect of Gasters in Undertale, yet its there and in many ways that unknown quality makes the game better. At the same time if it doesn't make sense I feel strongly that its fair to think it may be a sly commentary within genre conventions.
In closing, both these games are 'forgettable' except in rare shower excursions, but to lament or feel shame for the mental clutter they bring is silly. It was an experience that happened so theres no use in drowning it just to try and find the top ten list of all games of all time. One should not be so quick to expunge themselves of all consumption or desperately organize it for ego alone. I think its better to just let it all float out there like the junk it is. I'll keep my wardrobe intact, and my word of advice is that you probably should to.
"Actually you can not forget what has happened to you. So, don't trust your memory" - Negativland, This is Not Normal
* I never finished it. I took a 400 course I failed because I was supposed to read through this and couldn't stand it. However, it sounds appropriate enough and that's what matters. Originally I was gonna quote Trainwrecks being mad at somebody in his chat for calling his house empty but I couldn't find the clip. The only reason I mention this is because it reinforces my point about 'mental clutter'. I watched that clip at some point and now I cant fucking find it, I spent 20 minutes trying to do so before giving up. I don't even like the guy I just thought it was funny but whatever, thats life. "So it goes" - Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 'Wrong about the events of Dresden ' Five
Bookshelf Companion
"As all partings foreshadow the great final one, so, empty rooms, bereft of a familiar presence, mournfully whisper what your room and what mine must one day be. " - Charles Dickens, Bleak House
About a month ago I moved out of my parents house for the first time, and I just want to say I'm very glad I played this first before I moved out because I absolutely would have done what the text here depicts. In Minimalist (2017) you pick everything up to get rid of it, and then you are left with an empty space afterwards.
For a very short time period in 2018 I fell into a few different rabbit holes. I was out as a girl to most of my online friends but still struggling to convince the rest of the irl population I was (depressingly, I still deal with this). Most of those rabbit holes are rather dark, Otakudom, Scientism, interest in reactionary arguments (ie the peterson religiousity trap, skepticism of NB people, etc.). These are all terrible, there was a lot to like about me in this time and I wasn't some horrific bigot but I was a dumb suburban white girl with no political compass. A seemingly more benign interest was in the Minimalist movement, as a lifestyle and aesthetic. A mixture of literal CEO mindset shit like wearing only 1 shirt, and living space decisions like abandoning as much furniture and extraneous shit in your life as you can. I watched stupid ass movies like Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things (2016) on netflix. Consume a bunch of youtube videos which were an aggregate of Tiny House glorification, lifestyle aesthetic videos that showed bedrooms as if they were hospital chambers, and a touch of 'minimalist philosophy' like thinking Diogenes of Sinope was the only good philosopher because of his dedication to 'minimalism'. To illustrate here's a genuine excerpt of what I said from around the time to my girlfriend in support of how I have a smaller rating scale:
"Like in my opinion I've started realizing that minimalism is more or less how I already operate
I'm all about trying to focus on 'good' art, 'good' people (though that can be a tad more complex), etc.
Minimalism is all about trying to focus on what you like, what's helping you in life
Trying to enjoy that, and then discarding the clutter"
In retrospect this plays right into the insecurity about having 'good mental hygeine'. You see it all the time in reflexive anti consumerist sentiments. Later that same year I would buy a bunch of 'girly clothes' and throw a good 3/4ths of my boy wardrobe in the trash. 'Thats it, I dont need anymore things'. This seemed like a logical step of maturity from understanding how my family threw away all the gamecube game boxes and put it in a giant CD case. They even threw away the gamecube itself because logically, the Wii can run all that stuff now anyway. While I heavily disagree with doing that now, at the time I thought well thats minimalism isnt it, no need to keep plastic trash around the house. The problem is that logical next step would be to throw away every game disc for the playstation or xbox since the computer can technically run it. Why not take this 'digital nomadism' to its logical extreme? Why have any objects at all?
...
Well, it's not like I had some profound realization from playing Minimalist, by this point a half decade later I already recognized how silly and empty it is to have no furniture. Hell, if anything woke me up to it its probably the opening of Cruelty Squad (2021) which depicts just how pathetic and depressed doing that actually is. However, Minimalist did make me recognize that I probably shouldn't just abandon everything. I brought some books I loved from before I left, I haven't touched them at all because I read most of my books online but its nice to know that they are there just in case. More importantly, I had panicked about how many loads of laundry I have to do and that I should trash 3/4ths of it again, but this jolted me from following up on that.
More broadly, Minimalist is short and small, to the point its almost unsatisfying. These 'one room' bitsy games are, by accident or intentionally in direct commentary with the first ever bitsy game released Where did I put it? (2016) by Patrick Hale. In which you explore your small space to find something abstract you lost in messy home. Here, its inverted to be an attempt to lose everything. To lose the ego attached to 'objects' rather than trying to find it. Here's what I think is clever though, there's an emptiness in BOTH texts due to a lack of an ending. In one you find out what you're missing but never find it properly, theres no end credit loop like in other bitsy games. Here, you lose that, but you also lose the ability to prompt any more dialogue boxes since you just got rid of all the objects by interacting with them. In Where did I put it? you can technically loop the dialogue thoughts forever in an infernal mindtrap, here you have the opposite, the infernal mindtrap in not having mental prompts.
Every time you choose to own or release an object from your home, you're making an implicit decision of 'memory' just as much as of identity. Having an object anchored lets you remember what you had, so the allure of digitizing all of these memories into the computer makes sense in theory but the problem is the complexity of it never quite goes away. In 2020 or so I lost every single piece of memory stored on my computer. The reaction images, pictures of discussions I had with my ex, etc. It was devastating. Made worse by the fact I just broke up at the time with her and found out that my old discussions with her in Skype are lost to time. At least my version of skype, I lost everything. In a way this is privileged, because most people have more serious versions of this that are marginalized. Being kicked out suddenly from their home, having an abuser destroy their objects, having to flee in a war. By that reasoning, I've come into this realization of memory in its relationship to objects a little late.
On the literary level, I always knew it was there. Yet never really wanted to accept it personally, because I'm a 'digital girl'. However as both these texts accurately represent there is no real distinction between physical hoarding and digital hoarding in both how objects can arrest you and in how 'freeing' from them is just as solemn. I could just as easy consider these databases a form of memory hoarding. At any moment I could panic about how I 'dont remember anything' and try to frantically categorize what I played, listened to, and watched. I've experienced so much art at 25 that its running that panic of incoherent clutter, and odds are if you're reading this the same is likely true for you to. I'm failing in for instance movie trivia and constantly feeling I need to play catch up and create flash cards, only to then simplify it. One day I'll spend trying to categorize every 3D platformer I've played and want to play, the next I'll say to myself 'ok fuck it, only 3D mario matters now or whatever'. Do you remember everything? Or do you like me often find yourself checking quietly in a tab to make sure you're getting the information right? How good is your recall? What is really forgettable to you and how do you organize the stuff you want to remember?
Anyway, I could waffle about this all day to no fruition, but instead I want to just point out something. In Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy (2001) you have long voice acted cinematic conversations with the NPCs to move the story along, they are entertaining and endearing. However when you try to speak to them after they tell you what to do, they simply will not talk to you or repeat themselves. They'll tell you basically to leave them alone and go do this. The first time this happens its surprising, because the norm is that you should be able to talk to the dialogue givers for repeat information whenever you want. Similarly to expectations, a person who has played a lot of early JRPGs and point and click games, are going to find the lack of objects you can look at and get dialogue from in Chrono Trigger equally suprising. Yet in both these games it makes sense to do without even though it leaves behind an 'eeriness' for the player. The player being forced to either remember or recognize that they are bothering is more immersive. These 2 games, Minimalist and Where did I put it are not immersive by comparison, they comment on videogame form itself. It's limitations and how those limitations can reflect onto the player. See, this comment response the author left on the page is in my view the real ending.
"Thanks! I wanted the 'end' of the game to be a time to reflect, since there's literally nothing left to do since you've willingly got rid of everything you own. I felt like explicitly stating the character's reasoning to the player would detract from the player coming to their own conclusion. Yours is totally valid, but others might have thought of something else- maybe the character is going off to become a monk? :)"
The real end game is being so distressed that you try to interact with the creator to find a catharsis for the fiction to make sense. Because the 'ending' of the game in the text is so unreal that you cant ever feel certain its really there. After playing enough bitsy games now I've realized not having an ending is just a running bit between these people, probably a satirical response to the 'looping' thats built into the engine when it does end. You'll have to find closure somewhere else. Yet outside of this we should be comfortable with the prospect that we might just be missing the conclusion, or that there never was one in the first place. Not every memory exists to be recalled evenly, and not every game exists to be concluded upon. It's both the great curse and the benefit of gaming as an art form that it brings with it an ambiguity of intentions and expected results. Sometimes its better to just be at peace with it, for instance there was never any 'conclusive' aspect of Gasters in Undertale, yet its there and in many ways that unknown quality makes the game better. At the same time if it doesn't make sense I feel strongly that its fair to think it may be a sly commentary within genre conventions.
In closing, both these games are 'forgettable' except in rare shower excursions, but to lament or feel shame for the mental clutter they bring is silly. It was an experience that happened so theres no use in drowning it just to try and find the top ten list of all games of all time. One should not be so quick to expunge themselves of all consumption or desperately organize it for ego alone. I think its better to just let it all float out there like the junk it is. I'll keep my wardrobe intact, and my word of advice is that you probably should to.
"Actually you can not forget what has happened to you. So, don't trust your memory" - Negativland, This is Not Normal
* I never finished it. I took a 400 course I failed because I was supposed to read through this and couldn't stand it. However, it sounds appropriate enough and that's what matters. Originally I was gonna quote Trainwrecks being mad at somebody in his chat for calling his house empty but I couldn't find the clip. The only reason I mention this is because it reinforces my point about 'mental clutter'. I watched that clip at some point and now I cant fucking find it, I spent 20 minutes trying to do so before giving up. I don't even like the guy I just thought it was funny but whatever, thats life. "So it goes" - Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 'Wrong about the events of Dresden ' Five
2019
Car Companion
One aspect that my own discipline on how I go about reflecting on games on here evades is the fact that I'm kind of a moron. As I eluded mildly in my last post, Minimalist, my relationship to my memories and recall is at best mildly amusing, imitating a real 'whose on first' style of trivia prompting from other people. At its worst though, it feels like early onset dementia. For instance earlier today, somebody liked my post on Magic Vigilante this fantastic horizontal shmup that I poured a strong appraisal in. I don't remember writing this, and I almost don't remember playing the game. If you had asked me 'what did you think of Magic Vigilante' 2 days after I played the game, I would tell you 'what? what are you talking about?'. I do like it now that I remember it, I do want to play it again sometime soon, but I didn't recall it at all until that happened. It's possible part of that is due to the fact there's no point in a SHMUP where you can sit and stare at scene and let it imprint. The sequences of what you see on screen in a SHMUP are by design always moving. There's a terminal rush going on that never slows down. This explains certainly why I can remember what the shop looks like in Oblivion (dusty, some barrels around, croaky music, potion flasks littered around everywhere, a soothing tannish brown plastered on all the objects) yet not remember so well a SHMUP, but this explanation is just that: an explanation. At the end of the day my memory is still painfully jagged and sudden. It's a ball of worms, not an epiphany. This is the norm.
I don't really want to continue endlessly the wistfulness about myself here, I think it can start this slightly obnoxious descent into a panicky attitude about life. It can cause readers to want to bow out because you're no longer focused on the experiences of the game but instead yourself. I don't want to come on here and act like a David Foster Wallace short story on everyone's timeline by any means. So, the point of noting this at all is simply to say that when some of us joke we don't remember what we even had for breakfast yesterday, that's not a joke, we really mean it.
Contrast that with the work of the Pagan series and some of my initial insecurity about intelligence and memory start to make sense. Many other people mention that Pagan: Autogeny leaves the vignette formula of the previous 2 games, and clearly follows up on building a more ambitious world that those 2 games set out. Lost niche MMOs to war, girls that may no longer exist, tarot cards, etc. You're clearly meant to be in a hostile world of knowledge you're behind on. But some more behind than others. The first title, Pagan: Technopolis is stated to be good but constrained in comparison to how 'ambitious' this title is. I disagree. Before you even download the game you're hit with a James Joyce quote, you know the modernist icon of synaptic memory. I've read some Joyce, particularly A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man which in many ways may be my favorite book, but the thing is that's 19 year old Joyce, one where there's some references to a bygone past but still playful within a limit you can understand. The references aren't overwhelming yet. She quotes from a short story collection Dubliners, in which symbolic objects begin to take on a multiplicity of meaning to such an extent it feels intimidating. I've been a 'fraudulant fan' of Joyce for a good while but the reality is I never could get past the first chapter in any of his other books. I just liked the prose.
Opening the first game in your trilogy with a Joyce quote rings these very specific alarm bells to a player in the know: Pay attention! The 'small scope' of that game, duely populated as it is, makes up plenty in its evocative density. A nuclear processing plant that's just an entire section of town. A weird fox cult. A player piano ringing out in particular a classical tune I straight up cant remember (god save me for this, I hummed it drunk once in a moment of pure suffering about 5 months ago now, at my lowest, and yet I can't remember the name). Finally you're building the statue of Venus. Goddess of love. I don't know, its all very 'considered' in my view. Each symbol is trying to evoke something in reference to everything else. There's a sense of relational distance going on that is surprisingly rare for the medium. I'm behind on my mythological history though, so its all lost on me. Point is that Autogeny is not where it first gets symbolically esoteric, it's just a slightly larger version of the same contemplation.
By this game the textuality of it. In the texture of the world had set in, this game series was clever and mysterious. I was having trouble keeping up so I asked a friend to help me out. @BloodMachine. Very helpful she was, though consternated me rightly for feeling lost and helpless through the world. This was over half a year ago now, but it feels like it happened half a decade ago honestly. I beat one of the endings, and a mystical angel beamed down and broke the world. That's not the real ending, you have to go back in there and do something else. So I did, I tried to.
Then it happened. The dreadful memory of a childhood wasted.
I found what I think is a 'bug'. In Pagan: Autogeny one way in which you can fast travel is via a car. Which takes you there automatically. You can look around in the front seat as its railroads you back and forth between that destination point. Somehow the car sequence looped, and just waited around for it to stop. It never did, so I soaked in it, and lay down for a bit with it running. The soothing reverberation and chaotic anxiety of being trapped in a vehicle outside your modus of control. I was transported back to the misery of my childhood, in a miserable professorial little gender I would later denounce...
My family spent years in my youth traveling by car. Hundreds upon thousands of hours spent in this vehicle. I would always try to read, get sickly and lie down. It was boring but soothing in a bleak way. Many peoples childhoods are made up of playground antics, or daycare entertainment. They reflect fondly on how they spent years of their life like this. Mine was spent listening to shitty rock music, on the highway, quietly closing my eyes or imagining some creature a friend chasing me leaping from tree to tree inspired by the energetic scenes in Code Lyoko...my favourite show as a child which I remember shit all about now. My isolated childhood, a majority car. It came back to me. The alienness of it. No wonder I have such a faulty relationship to memory when burbling down american roads in transit is the highlight of my childhood. Keeping myself entertained through the mild car sickness by doing mental math puzzles at 5. Doing sudokus at 10. Daydreaming at 14. Thinking about anime at 19. Arrested asphalt development.
I'm not sure I will ever understand what the Pagan games are trying to tell me. But the sound effects work here in this way of 'uncovering'. When you leave one area into another there's a loud door slam noise. You swear you've heard it somewhere before. It's all satisfying in this way. You swear you've fought this frog boss somewhere before. A game that feels like a representation of something lost. In choice moments it comes into your vision and then goes vague again. You walk at the perfect speed, its all rightly woozy. This is life, ambiguous and unsatisfying in its complexity, and all you can cling onto is these weird noises that remind you of your childhood. Devs might find this relationship to their work cantankerous and anti intellectual. To me though, the sound design is the alpha and omega to this whole resonance. Trap a player in a room and perform the right sounds at them, and see what happens.
The worlds, the noises they make when you interact in certain ways. Sound design is the 'prose' of videogames. The gameplay don't have to be 'perfect'. You don't have to find the 'ending' or 'get it'. Its just there, its just those noises and that world, the complexity of references only get you so far. When all is done, for me at least, its how it sounds that really matters, and this, for me, one of the best sounding worlds out there.
One aspect that my own discipline on how I go about reflecting on games on here evades is the fact that I'm kind of a moron. As I eluded mildly in my last post, Minimalist, my relationship to my memories and recall is at best mildly amusing, imitating a real 'whose on first' style of trivia prompting from other people. At its worst though, it feels like early onset dementia. For instance earlier today, somebody liked my post on Magic Vigilante this fantastic horizontal shmup that I poured a strong appraisal in. I don't remember writing this, and I almost don't remember playing the game. If you had asked me 'what did you think of Magic Vigilante' 2 days after I played the game, I would tell you 'what? what are you talking about?'. I do like it now that I remember it, I do want to play it again sometime soon, but I didn't recall it at all until that happened. It's possible part of that is due to the fact there's no point in a SHMUP where you can sit and stare at scene and let it imprint. The sequences of what you see on screen in a SHMUP are by design always moving. There's a terminal rush going on that never slows down. This explains certainly why I can remember what the shop looks like in Oblivion (dusty, some barrels around, croaky music, potion flasks littered around everywhere, a soothing tannish brown plastered on all the objects) yet not remember so well a SHMUP, but this explanation is just that: an explanation. At the end of the day my memory is still painfully jagged and sudden. It's a ball of worms, not an epiphany. This is the norm.
I don't really want to continue endlessly the wistfulness about myself here, I think it can start this slightly obnoxious descent into a panicky attitude about life. It can cause readers to want to bow out because you're no longer focused on the experiences of the game but instead yourself. I don't want to come on here and act like a David Foster Wallace short story on everyone's timeline by any means. So, the point of noting this at all is simply to say that when some of us joke we don't remember what we even had for breakfast yesterday, that's not a joke, we really mean it.
Contrast that with the work of the Pagan series and some of my initial insecurity about intelligence and memory start to make sense. Many other people mention that Pagan: Autogeny leaves the vignette formula of the previous 2 games, and clearly follows up on building a more ambitious world that those 2 games set out. Lost niche MMOs to war, girls that may no longer exist, tarot cards, etc. You're clearly meant to be in a hostile world of knowledge you're behind on. But some more behind than others. The first title, Pagan: Technopolis is stated to be good but constrained in comparison to how 'ambitious' this title is. I disagree. Before you even download the game you're hit with a James Joyce quote, you know the modernist icon of synaptic memory. I've read some Joyce, particularly A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man which in many ways may be my favorite book, but the thing is that's 19 year old Joyce, one where there's some references to a bygone past but still playful within a limit you can understand. The references aren't overwhelming yet. She quotes from a short story collection Dubliners, in which symbolic objects begin to take on a multiplicity of meaning to such an extent it feels intimidating. I've been a 'fraudulant fan' of Joyce for a good while but the reality is I never could get past the first chapter in any of his other books. I just liked the prose.
Opening the first game in your trilogy with a Joyce quote rings these very specific alarm bells to a player in the know: Pay attention! The 'small scope' of that game, duely populated as it is, makes up plenty in its evocative density. A nuclear processing plant that's just an entire section of town. A weird fox cult. A player piano ringing out in particular a classical tune I straight up cant remember (god save me for this, I hummed it drunk once in a moment of pure suffering about 5 months ago now, at my lowest, and yet I can't remember the name). Finally you're building the statue of Venus. Goddess of love. I don't know, its all very 'considered' in my view. Each symbol is trying to evoke something in reference to everything else. There's a sense of relational distance going on that is surprisingly rare for the medium. I'm behind on my mythological history though, so its all lost on me. Point is that Autogeny is not where it first gets symbolically esoteric, it's just a slightly larger version of the same contemplation.
By this game the textuality of it. In the texture of the world had set in, this game series was clever and mysterious. I was having trouble keeping up so I asked a friend to help me out. @BloodMachine. Very helpful she was, though consternated me rightly for feeling lost and helpless through the world. This was over half a year ago now, but it feels like it happened half a decade ago honestly. I beat one of the endings, and a mystical angel beamed down and broke the world. That's not the real ending, you have to go back in there and do something else. So I did, I tried to.
Then it happened. The dreadful memory of a childhood wasted.
I found what I think is a 'bug'. In Pagan: Autogeny one way in which you can fast travel is via a car. Which takes you there automatically. You can look around in the front seat as its railroads you back and forth between that destination point. Somehow the car sequence looped, and just waited around for it to stop. It never did, so I soaked in it, and lay down for a bit with it running. The soothing reverberation and chaotic anxiety of being trapped in a vehicle outside your modus of control. I was transported back to the misery of my childhood, in a miserable professorial little gender I would later denounce...
My family spent years in my youth traveling by car. Hundreds upon thousands of hours spent in this vehicle. I would always try to read, get sickly and lie down. It was boring but soothing in a bleak way. Many peoples childhoods are made up of playground antics, or daycare entertainment. They reflect fondly on how they spent years of their life like this. Mine was spent listening to shitty rock music, on the highway, quietly closing my eyes or imagining some creature a friend chasing me leaping from tree to tree inspired by the energetic scenes in Code Lyoko...my favourite show as a child which I remember shit all about now. My isolated childhood, a majority car. It came back to me. The alienness of it. No wonder I have such a faulty relationship to memory when burbling down american roads in transit is the highlight of my childhood. Keeping myself entertained through the mild car sickness by doing mental math puzzles at 5. Doing sudokus at 10. Daydreaming at 14. Thinking about anime at 19. Arrested asphalt development.
I'm not sure I will ever understand what the Pagan games are trying to tell me. But the sound effects work here in this way of 'uncovering'. When you leave one area into another there's a loud door slam noise. You swear you've heard it somewhere before. It's all satisfying in this way. You swear you've fought this frog boss somewhere before. A game that feels like a representation of something lost. In choice moments it comes into your vision and then goes vague again. You walk at the perfect speed, its all rightly woozy. This is life, ambiguous and unsatisfying in its complexity, and all you can cling onto is these weird noises that remind you of your childhood. Devs might find this relationship to their work cantankerous and anti intellectual. To me though, the sound design is the alpha and omega to this whole resonance. Trap a player in a room and perform the right sounds at them, and see what happens.
The worlds, the noises they make when you interact in certain ways. Sound design is the 'prose' of videogames. The gameplay don't have to be 'perfect'. You don't have to find the 'ending' or 'get it'. Its just there, its just those noises and that world, the complexity of references only get you so far. When all is done, for me at least, its how it sounds that really matters, and this, for me, one of the best sounding worlds out there.
2023
Post Note: This write up was made almost entirely with the purposes of promoting a discourse rather than saying something 'accurate' or 'convincing'. Only 1 day later and I mostly disagree with myself here, for instance swapping Chess out with Stratego instead and respecting input randomness far more. As such, this write up can be almost entirely skipped if you choose to do so, otherwise keep in mind that you're reading a process of understanding rather than a firm opinion as you will find in a majority of my other write ups. Thanks for understanding.
Whirling Wind Companion
I thought about saying something overcomplicated here, but instead I'll just like to this excerpt from Richard Garfield's lecture first
The above clip illustrates the concept that Skill and Luck are almost entirely disconnected in theory. You can play chess well and win or lose regardless to the dice output. Obviously it wouldn't be fun, but there's still a skill being tested otherwise from the play experience. While I think this is an interesting illustration though, I don't quite think the full picture has been realized. For example Randochess would cause a player to focus on quick opening wins since there's still the secondary win condition of mating the King. The issue I have with this reasoning is that, even if we assume that the fun of an independent game isn't always predicated on winning or losing (experimentation being a large factor that randomness supports and keeps exciting), the matrix of overall play and retention is focused on the idea of rewarding mindful play. A bad player winning with a random die roll in Randochess is not going to be happy, they will feel their win as phyric and undeserved. A good player winning with a random die may get some relief in independent games but, the underlying stress of this emergent uncontrollable output probability never goes away.
If this explanation illustrates anything, it probably explains why prolonged sessions of any CCG I play start to make me upset. For one, you never know how the other other player is feeling in these games online and even when you do have access to that communication they are usually just using the 'meta' of communication to taunt you. You can feel what you perceive as the random output unfairness as a 'phyrric' victory over you, but you can't substantiate that opinion onto the other player. Fairness in online gaming is isolated, often only found in solidarity through paratextual forums where people can commiserate with you about it at best. However, it's worth noting that I only play CCGs because my nervous system is crappy and I'm at a severe disadvantage in action games. At the end of his lecture Mr. Garfield shows how invisible randomness elements can keep players around in any game, through revealing that his studies caused the TF2 system of critical hits to happen. This new output randomness was sneaked into the system which he said needs to be done in order to make players not complain. If you add high variable output randomness into an existing game, skilled players will dislike it.
While I don't want to write the book on gaming by any means, I think its worth considering how good Chess is for a moment. Chess is a game with an almost infinite number of decisions to make open to the player, giving them room to test things out. Every decision made is maximally fair, and there's still room for experimentation for players that don't care about direct victory. In these cases, at least until a certain level of skill differential, chess as a meta game utilizes its own anti randomness to be more fun. When I play chess with my mom or my girlfriend, I'm not even that interested in 'beating' them, sometimes I'll sandbag pieces because I like the feeling of confusion and bemusement, along with the fact it often lets me experience new forking situations I wouldn't have learned about otherwise. There's an aspect from the lack of output randomness that makes the game better because it transforms the independent zero sum game into a cooperative experience. Chess and learning chess go hand in hand for any player past the 700 elo mark, and why not? Minimal phyrric victories, maxmimal learning opportunities, a resonance between skill and play, plenty of open experimentation. If I want to be so bold I would say that chess has about as much going in as any open world game in terms of guided exploration, but since its happening on the meta level, people dont view it that way.
Anyway the point of all this is to say that Pokemon Chess is just Randochess 2.0 on the one hand. You can miss attacks and get crits just like in pokemon, except here it causes the passing of turns instead of an outright loss, but for anybody even remotely competent at chess the results are the same. The output variables are moved from the dice into the pieces, but its really just automating a process that would have been done physically anyway irl. You have a choice over what to make each piece's type, and I'm sure pokemon experts know for instance, the exact type for instance that is strongest against any other type, and if you knew the typing charts in their entirety you'd have a leg up but after that point there can't be too much strategy to it. You would still be mapping on a system of strategic randomness checks onto an already existing system of non strategic randomness. This isn't stratego, you can still see all the types of the enemy pieces, so at the point it just becomes following a heuristic and hoping the output is on your side (and of course, trying to close out games asap).
Now Pokemon Chess is a miserable game, or at least not an interesting one to get good at for the majority of people primarily because Chess already exists. However, not every game is interested in making its influences clear. TF2 was likely inspired by Quake Arena but its not going to tell you that. Along with this there's a constant desire to redo engines and combat physics in order to add this novelty back in regardless. So my point is this: I think theres a formal point to be made here in what we do and don't desire in games. I think in the majority of cases that answer is actually in whether a game having random elements is in benefit of the game or not. For instance, all card games by design have randomness, but how much of it can be mitigated while keeping the skill intact? Card game players have known forever that in any game where you have control over the number of cards in your deck, the strongest and most reliable decks have the minimum number of possible cards, with the infamy of cards like Pot of Greed in Yugioh being a clear illustration of this fact. At some point though, digital CCGs realized that fixed card numbers for all players just made the game more enjoyable for everyone while also limiting randomness. In this case the input randomness of the entire genre was mitigated. We can imagine a world in which the toy game randochess was made first, and in that case we would have to imagine a world in which chess was not found from it a fucking tragedy. In what world would that happen you ask? In a world where either the copyrighting of fundamental game design is normalized, and/or a world in which people think random output is so entertaining that taking it out would make the game unfun rather than enhancing the enjoyability of the game.
We live in both of those worlds, so chew on that for a moment. If random input and output aspects can be mitigated, and those random elements don't have an explicit narrative application, they almost certainly should be removed, but given the opportunity that simplification of randomness should actually be expressed through a new game or a patched version. Along with that, I strongly believe criticizing these luck based elements and thinking about how they can be simplified away from should be a central struggle of game criticism and design. Let's stop worshipping luck and start focusing on incentivizing systems that give the players a large number of interesting decision making opportunities.
Whirling Wind Companion
I thought about saying something overcomplicated here, but instead I'll just like to this excerpt from Richard Garfield's lecture first
The above clip illustrates the concept that Skill and Luck are almost entirely disconnected in theory. You can play chess well and win or lose regardless to the dice output. Obviously it wouldn't be fun, but there's still a skill being tested otherwise from the play experience. While I think this is an interesting illustration though, I don't quite think the full picture has been realized. For example Randochess would cause a player to focus on quick opening wins since there's still the secondary win condition of mating the King. The issue I have with this reasoning is that, even if we assume that the fun of an independent game isn't always predicated on winning or losing (experimentation being a large factor that randomness supports and keeps exciting), the matrix of overall play and retention is focused on the idea of rewarding mindful play. A bad player winning with a random die roll in Randochess is not going to be happy, they will feel their win as phyric and undeserved. A good player winning with a random die may get some relief in independent games but, the underlying stress of this emergent uncontrollable output probability never goes away.
If this explanation illustrates anything, it probably explains why prolonged sessions of any CCG I play start to make me upset. For one, you never know how the other other player is feeling in these games online and even when you do have access to that communication they are usually just using the 'meta' of communication to taunt you. You can feel what you perceive as the random output unfairness as a 'phyrric' victory over you, but you can't substantiate that opinion onto the other player. Fairness in online gaming is isolated, often only found in solidarity through paratextual forums where people can commiserate with you about it at best. However, it's worth noting that I only play CCGs because my nervous system is crappy and I'm at a severe disadvantage in action games. At the end of his lecture Mr. Garfield shows how invisible randomness elements can keep players around in any game, through revealing that his studies caused the TF2 system of critical hits to happen. This new output randomness was sneaked into the system which he said needs to be done in order to make players not complain. If you add high variable output randomness into an existing game, skilled players will dislike it.
While I don't want to write the book on gaming by any means, I think its worth considering how good Chess is for a moment. Chess is a game with an almost infinite number of decisions to make open to the player, giving them room to test things out. Every decision made is maximally fair, and there's still room for experimentation for players that don't care about direct victory. In these cases, at least until a certain level of skill differential, chess as a meta game utilizes its own anti randomness to be more fun. When I play chess with my mom or my girlfriend, I'm not even that interested in 'beating' them, sometimes I'll sandbag pieces because I like the feeling of confusion and bemusement, along with the fact it often lets me experience new forking situations I wouldn't have learned about otherwise. There's an aspect from the lack of output randomness that makes the game better because it transforms the independent zero sum game into a cooperative experience. Chess and learning chess go hand in hand for any player past the 700 elo mark, and why not? Minimal phyrric victories, maxmimal learning opportunities, a resonance between skill and play, plenty of open experimentation. If I want to be so bold I would say that chess has about as much going in as any open world game in terms of guided exploration, but since its happening on the meta level, people dont view it that way.
Anyway the point of all this is to say that Pokemon Chess is just Randochess 2.0 on the one hand. You can miss attacks and get crits just like in pokemon, except here it causes the passing of turns instead of an outright loss, but for anybody even remotely competent at chess the results are the same. The output variables are moved from the dice into the pieces, but its really just automating a process that would have been done physically anyway irl. You have a choice over what to make each piece's type, and I'm sure pokemon experts know for instance, the exact type for instance that is strongest against any other type, and if you knew the typing charts in their entirety you'd have a leg up but after that point there can't be too much strategy to it. You would still be mapping on a system of strategic randomness checks onto an already existing system of non strategic randomness. This isn't stratego, you can still see all the types of the enemy pieces, so at the point it just becomes following a heuristic and hoping the output is on your side (and of course, trying to close out games asap).
Now Pokemon Chess is a miserable game, or at least not an interesting one to get good at for the majority of people primarily because Chess already exists. However, not every game is interested in making its influences clear. TF2 was likely inspired by Quake Arena but its not going to tell you that. Along with this there's a constant desire to redo engines and combat physics in order to add this novelty back in regardless. So my point is this: I think theres a formal point to be made here in what we do and don't desire in games. I think in the majority of cases that answer is actually in whether a game having random elements is in benefit of the game or not. For instance, all card games by design have randomness, but how much of it can be mitigated while keeping the skill intact? Card game players have known forever that in any game where you have control over the number of cards in your deck, the strongest and most reliable decks have the minimum number of possible cards, with the infamy of cards like Pot of Greed in Yugioh being a clear illustration of this fact. At some point though, digital CCGs realized that fixed card numbers for all players just made the game more enjoyable for everyone while also limiting randomness. In this case the input randomness of the entire genre was mitigated. We can imagine a world in which the toy game randochess was made first, and in that case we would have to imagine a world in which chess was not found from it a fucking tragedy. In what world would that happen you ask? In a world where either the copyrighting of fundamental game design is normalized, and/or a world in which people think random output is so entertaining that taking it out would make the game unfun rather than enhancing the enjoyability of the game.
We live in both of those worlds, so chew on that for a moment. If random input and output aspects can be mitigated, and those random elements don't have an explicit narrative application, they almost certainly should be removed, but given the opportunity that simplification of randomness should actually be expressed through a new game or a patched version. Along with that, I strongly believe criticizing these luck based elements and thinking about how they can be simplified away from should be a central struggle of game criticism and design. Let's stop worshipping luck and start focusing on incentivizing systems that give the players a large number of interesting decision making opportunities.
2022
Saxophone Companion
So the popularization of various '-dle' clones as a mode for trivia needs basically no introduction. While there's no 'canon' to which to enjoy, Wordle implicitly brought back the dormant web browser guessing game joy pioneered by Geogeussr and Wikipedia's more general hyperlink information systems. In the sense that it focuses on the relationship between player knowledge and the desire for players to learn anew. All the words in the original Wordle (before the NY Time acquisition fucked up the word pool with words like SNAFU) were fair of course but on the other hand there were plenty of words that you could guess to like January 9th 2022 word 'Gorge' that would coincide with an appreciation for that word. Looking it up and letting it sink in. Wordle in this sense is not simply a process of elimination puzzle game, it's a game that in some very actual sense was pulling your cognitave webmap of the english language to the forefront again. Causing you to process the verbs and nouns that exist in the shadows of concious dialogue. At the risk of overintellectualizing it a little bit, I think this is the real 'mass appeal' of wordle. If it was just a hangman clone nobody would care, the wordlist and its relationship to passive knowledge acquisition does a lot to move the goalpost where it otherwise wouldn't. Crossword players are already in deep, Wordle makes the ambitions way more subtle. Just try to solve this 1 small puzzle and go about your day again. Let the success of guessing the word 'rivet' settle.
Entering down the pipeline are the various clones: Gamedle, Posterdle, Tradle, Heardle etc., yet while these games can be equally as fun to try and guess at for players passionate with it, the knowledge base is far more limited in scope. You usually have to have a prior fixed knowledge on the subject in order to have a good chance, whereas any english language speaker after the 9th grade has a chance in Wordle. There's often a snobbish aversion to 'mass appeal' games on the concept that they are 'dumbing things down' for players, but if there's anywhere we can interfere in our on snobbishness on that idea is in imagining a similar snobbery that crossword enthusiasts would lob at Wordle. 'Its too easy and usually too short' would be missing the point, and the esoterica of trivia linguistic riddles crosswords assess are for people who already have the synaptic network for that part of their brain pulled together. I'm serious when I say that this exact dialogue exists for almost any other genre you can imagine. We often forget that older people have troubles dealing with quick changes in onscreen information, which is why Wii Sports is a perfectly fine alternative to the quick decision making of Madden or Rocket League.
Trivia game postulation aside, I think this is what makes musicle less of a bastard child to what is being tested in these low stakes quick to play trivia games than something like Heardle. In Heardle either you know or you don't the song being run, I think people found the granularity of nessecary preinformation needed to guess a Heardle really funny in this regard, and is the reason there are more Heardle clones than probably Wordle ones. One Direction Heardle, Yoshi Heardle, Touhou Heardle, etc. If you don't know the initial properties then what chance do you have? After you fail to guess how likely are you to really linger on it in comparison? In my case not that much. I usually roll my eyes and move on not thinking about the specific Yoshi song meaningfully almost at all. If I were to actualize a hypothesis from this data it might be something like 'Game design in trivia/puzzle games has to find ways for failing solutions not to feel frustrating'.
Musicle offers a bunch of genres to choose from, allowing for you to choose the difficulty of information, you can choose jazz if you know jazz etc. Then its 'tests' you to listen to a song and choose which album its from out of a selection of 4, with the full cover art of the album fully displayed. That's nothing new, that's basically an exam test format, as dreadful as those have become. The nuance is this: it does feel frusterating at all to fail an answer because the remainder from being wrong is new music to look into! This is the flavor that makes it stand out to me. In this way Musicle operates just as much as a game as an esoteric aggregation resource for learning new music. Even if I'm wrong on any guess I'm never annoyed because I'm lingering on the answer and exploring it. This is I think a nessecary distinction to make and one that makes exploring the '-dles' as more than just an internet novelty worthwhile. Wordle was not that complicated to make but highly enjoyable in its original form, I believe a large part of the spice missing is that it wasn't just a puzzle for puzzle's sake, its was gamified curiosity. While Musicle is a bit too splayed out due to its 20 genre categories to latch on as a popular phenomenon, it'll never have the same level of mass appeal, the spirit of its dynamics is still there. This is that aspect of a lot of these clones I find frusterating. Even if I have fun with Timeguessr, and find out about the picture shown is the berlin wall, there's always this lingering feeling of 'tell me more'. With a simple set of guessed words that process is obvious, but with even Geogeussr there was always this feeling that the ability to get better or have new novelty trivia is right outside my reach.
I could end my diatribe there, but allow me a further indulgence for a moment. I bring this all up because I think as I get older I've come to recognize that educational value and gamification are way more interlinked than we recognize. On my last birthday I played the interactive geometry tool called Euclidea, I was frusterated with the limits of my knowledge a lot then and how to improve with it. If you're interested, you can read it here. Well it's about a year later, my birthday is coming up again soon, and I have to be honest and say that while that game was extremely frustrating almost nothing has given such a direct interaction between authentic knowledge and progression for me since then until this game. When I was in school I was obsessed with algebra puzzles, they were so fun for me and people would often try to get me in higher maths and fail in doing so (because the school tests thought I was too stupid to handle them or whatever). Basic solving equations with neat outputs you can stack upon. Euclidea's progression system is far more linear and end goal driven than any of the -dle clones, but I'm convinced that there's more than just novelty under the surface here. I think we may as a game's culture let Trivial Pursuit speak a bit too loudly and quarantine this entire genre to novelty and vulgar pop culture. Perhaps the depth is more than just ankle deep, perhaps the informative aspect of design is only a few steps away from being resurfaced, with Balance of the Planet being the invisible progenitor to a diaspora in game information systems.
So the popularization of various '-dle' clones as a mode for trivia needs basically no introduction. While there's no 'canon' to which to enjoy, Wordle implicitly brought back the dormant web browser guessing game joy pioneered by Geogeussr and Wikipedia's more general hyperlink information systems. In the sense that it focuses on the relationship between player knowledge and the desire for players to learn anew. All the words in the original Wordle (before the NY Time acquisition fucked up the word pool with words like SNAFU) were fair of course but on the other hand there were plenty of words that you could guess to like January 9th 2022 word 'Gorge' that would coincide with an appreciation for that word. Looking it up and letting it sink in. Wordle in this sense is not simply a process of elimination puzzle game, it's a game that in some very actual sense was pulling your cognitave webmap of the english language to the forefront again. Causing you to process the verbs and nouns that exist in the shadows of concious dialogue. At the risk of overintellectualizing it a little bit, I think this is the real 'mass appeal' of wordle. If it was just a hangman clone nobody would care, the wordlist and its relationship to passive knowledge acquisition does a lot to move the goalpost where it otherwise wouldn't. Crossword players are already in deep, Wordle makes the ambitions way more subtle. Just try to solve this 1 small puzzle and go about your day again. Let the success of guessing the word 'rivet' settle.
Entering down the pipeline are the various clones: Gamedle, Posterdle, Tradle, Heardle etc., yet while these games can be equally as fun to try and guess at for players passionate with it, the knowledge base is far more limited in scope. You usually have to have a prior fixed knowledge on the subject in order to have a good chance, whereas any english language speaker after the 9th grade has a chance in Wordle. There's often a snobbish aversion to 'mass appeal' games on the concept that they are 'dumbing things down' for players, but if there's anywhere we can interfere in our on snobbishness on that idea is in imagining a similar snobbery that crossword enthusiasts would lob at Wordle. 'Its too easy and usually too short' would be missing the point, and the esoterica of trivia linguistic riddles crosswords assess are for people who already have the synaptic network for that part of their brain pulled together. I'm serious when I say that this exact dialogue exists for almost any other genre you can imagine. We often forget that older people have troubles dealing with quick changes in onscreen information, which is why Wii Sports is a perfectly fine alternative to the quick decision making of Madden or Rocket League.
Trivia game postulation aside, I think this is what makes musicle less of a bastard child to what is being tested in these low stakes quick to play trivia games than something like Heardle. In Heardle either you know or you don't the song being run, I think people found the granularity of nessecary preinformation needed to guess a Heardle really funny in this regard, and is the reason there are more Heardle clones than probably Wordle ones. One Direction Heardle, Yoshi Heardle, Touhou Heardle, etc. If you don't know the initial properties then what chance do you have? After you fail to guess how likely are you to really linger on it in comparison? In my case not that much. I usually roll my eyes and move on not thinking about the specific Yoshi song meaningfully almost at all. If I were to actualize a hypothesis from this data it might be something like 'Game design in trivia/puzzle games has to find ways for failing solutions not to feel frustrating'.
Musicle offers a bunch of genres to choose from, allowing for you to choose the difficulty of information, you can choose jazz if you know jazz etc. Then its 'tests' you to listen to a song and choose which album its from out of a selection of 4, with the full cover art of the album fully displayed. That's nothing new, that's basically an exam test format, as dreadful as those have become. The nuance is this: it does feel frusterating at all to fail an answer because the remainder from being wrong is new music to look into! This is the flavor that makes it stand out to me. In this way Musicle operates just as much as a game as an esoteric aggregation resource for learning new music. Even if I'm wrong on any guess I'm never annoyed because I'm lingering on the answer and exploring it. This is I think a nessecary distinction to make and one that makes exploring the '-dles' as more than just an internet novelty worthwhile. Wordle was not that complicated to make but highly enjoyable in its original form, I believe a large part of the spice missing is that it wasn't just a puzzle for puzzle's sake, its was gamified curiosity. While Musicle is a bit too splayed out due to its 20 genre categories to latch on as a popular phenomenon, it'll never have the same level of mass appeal, the spirit of its dynamics is still there. This is that aspect of a lot of these clones I find frusterating. Even if I have fun with Timeguessr, and find out about the picture shown is the berlin wall, there's always this lingering feeling of 'tell me more'. With a simple set of guessed words that process is obvious, but with even Geogeussr there was always this feeling that the ability to get better or have new novelty trivia is right outside my reach.
I could end my diatribe there, but allow me a further indulgence for a moment. I bring this all up because I think as I get older I've come to recognize that educational value and gamification are way more interlinked than we recognize. On my last birthday I played the interactive geometry tool called Euclidea, I was frusterated with the limits of my knowledge a lot then and how to improve with it. If you're interested, you can read it here. Well it's about a year later, my birthday is coming up again soon, and I have to be honest and say that while that game was extremely frustrating almost nothing has given such a direct interaction between authentic knowledge and progression for me since then until this game. When I was in school I was obsessed with algebra puzzles, they were so fun for me and people would often try to get me in higher maths and fail in doing so (because the school tests thought I was too stupid to handle them or whatever). Basic solving equations with neat outputs you can stack upon. Euclidea's progression system is far more linear and end goal driven than any of the -dle clones, but I'm convinced that there's more than just novelty under the surface here. I think we may as a game's culture let Trivial Pursuit speak a bit too loudly and quarantine this entire genre to novelty and vulgar pop culture. Perhaps the depth is more than just ankle deep, perhaps the informative aspect of design is only a few steps away from being resurfaced, with Balance of the Planet being the invisible progenitor to a diaspora in game information systems.
2023
Tower Companion
"For years now people have been predicting that games would soon be made out of prefabricated objects, bought in a store and assembled into a world. For the most part, that hasn't happened, because the objects in the stores are trash. I don't mean they look bad or [that] they're badly made, although a lot of them are. I mean they're trash in the way that food becomes trash as soon as you put it in the sink. Things are made to be consumed in a certain context, and once the moment is gone they transform into garbage. In the context of technology those moments pass by in seconds. " - Bennett Foddy, Getting Over It rail section
Comedic Game Jam april fools VN about going on a tinder app and hooking up with doors. As a result of this premise it plays into 20s memetic language like 'bruh' and 'sus' on the one hand and for the sake of brevity turns most of the characters into short archetypes with end cards to match. It also has a great sense of color design and general UI flourishes for instance the keys icon spinning when hovering over choices is a great touch. What gets to me here tho is that if you took this premise beyond just stock anime archetypes you have great presentation that would make the concept of dating a door actually work to good effect. As such it feels like a prototype of a game with a lot of potential. This is most primarily seen in the 'Commandoor Locke' route where you can get a jail cell door to drop their tough guy act and melt for you. It may seem odd but I really some of the best art exposes itself through the aspect of the interactions of anthropomorphizations that haven't been considered yet. Whether it be birds (hatoful boyfriend), hedgehogs, or people turned into battleship parts (erostasis), or predator prey relationships (Tom and Jerry and Loony Tunes) theres a core part of the human desire to find seriousness in a story of silly representations. To find the confines and stretch them to what makes sense to tell a dramatic story. That might sound lofty or pretentious but honestly it goes all the way back at the very least to 1900s texts like Alice and Wonderland and Winnie the Pooh. Aesops Fables if you want to be incredibly generous.
So in a way Love Next Door represents the core frustration I have with the Game Jam industrialization at large, its a lot of concepts that are so unrealized they leave the audience wanting desperately to see anything more of them. Doors as romantic objects of player affection may seem like a joke, but its obvious just through playing this that a door can serve many different purposes and have character. Doors can be fancy or utilitarian, wartorn or hurt. Doors can have gold handles, brass ones, etc. Hell the existence of this game in itself proves that maybe the idea that people are 'as boring as a door' is actually wrong!
I guess the fundamental problem for me is that this is an overproduction of a lot of new and unique assets and concepts in a situation with a cruel relationship to copyright protections. It's nobody in particulars fault but when I see entire shoddy works like this my impulse is not to move on, my impulse is to possibly rewrite, mod, or otherwise reconfigure these works. It's not 'my work' though to do that, even if I don't get litigated directly it would only take a few days on the announcement of the idea for people to say I'm just plagerizing mechanics from these jams. So it begins to feel less like a culture of cute ideas and passion projects, and more like auto generated hierarchical ideas with which people can 'lay claim' to concepts for future use.
This point of course sounds painfully overambitious from somebody who hasn't made games at all, I'm only describing an unrealized personal impulse here. Yet, if I'm thinking that then its likely a lot of other people are to, and so the drive becomes 'I better stake my flag' rather than producing towards some goal. So I'm left in this awkward spot, on the one hand Love Next Door does everything it sets out to in a comedic tone, on the other hand it feels like a work that by its very existence is negating the future of its own concepts in this way. Has it occurred anybody else that anybody who creates a world featuring a talking candelabra would be under threat from the disney corporation for being too similar to Beauty and the Beast's Lumiere? To add to that, recently Winnie the Pooh finally became public domain but the dark part of it is that it has to be the old antiquated winnie the pooh designs, using the newer cartoon depictions would put you in the slammer. So thus Commander Doore lives and dies in this tiny jam work, this idea of mascots abandoned is a theme I explored so thoroughly in my old Yo! Noid 2 post that saying any more would be begging the point.
These games are clearly not made for mass consumption, it would be absurd to get annoyed at them unless they did something actually offensive. So, i'm only ever frusterated at these works from this viewpoint, an editor with no hope of inclusion, cursed to spectate as ideas get churned and then glazed in amber by the elusive wrath of propertarianism. I want a serious dating door game, I want to have a fictional crush on a door, just as I do on Ponies, and vampires, and all sorts of nonreal monstrosities that we attach ourselves onto! Now it might not happen (like sure you can just say 'well ask for permission then but I'm talking about a systemic problem here...). But my weird desires aside, this post could have been about any small work. It could have been anything. So it might as well be on a weird funny dating game joke that literally nobody cares about. Because hey, even if you think I'm totally off my rocker, at least you get to know that this exists :3
"For years now people have been predicting that games would soon be made out of prefabricated objects, bought in a store and assembled into a world. For the most part, that hasn't happened, because the objects in the stores are trash. I don't mean they look bad or [that] they're badly made, although a lot of them are. I mean they're trash in the way that food becomes trash as soon as you put it in the sink. Things are made to be consumed in a certain context, and once the moment is gone they transform into garbage. In the context of technology those moments pass by in seconds. " - Bennett Foddy, Getting Over It rail section
Comedic Game Jam april fools VN about going on a tinder app and hooking up with doors. As a result of this premise it plays into 20s memetic language like 'bruh' and 'sus' on the one hand and for the sake of brevity turns most of the characters into short archetypes with end cards to match. It also has a great sense of color design and general UI flourishes for instance the keys icon spinning when hovering over choices is a great touch. What gets to me here tho is that if you took this premise beyond just stock anime archetypes you have great presentation that would make the concept of dating a door actually work to good effect. As such it feels like a prototype of a game with a lot of potential. This is most primarily seen in the 'Commandoor Locke' route where you can get a jail cell door to drop their tough guy act and melt for you. It may seem odd but I really some of the best art exposes itself through the aspect of the interactions of anthropomorphizations that haven't been considered yet. Whether it be birds (hatoful boyfriend), hedgehogs, or people turned into battleship parts (erostasis), or predator prey relationships (Tom and Jerry and Loony Tunes) theres a core part of the human desire to find seriousness in a story of silly representations. To find the confines and stretch them to what makes sense to tell a dramatic story. That might sound lofty or pretentious but honestly it goes all the way back at the very least to 1900s texts like Alice and Wonderland and Winnie the Pooh. Aesops Fables if you want to be incredibly generous.
So in a way Love Next Door represents the core frustration I have with the Game Jam industrialization at large, its a lot of concepts that are so unrealized they leave the audience wanting desperately to see anything more of them. Doors as romantic objects of player affection may seem like a joke, but its obvious just through playing this that a door can serve many different purposes and have character. Doors can be fancy or utilitarian, wartorn or hurt. Doors can have gold handles, brass ones, etc. Hell the existence of this game in itself proves that maybe the idea that people are 'as boring as a door' is actually wrong!
I guess the fundamental problem for me is that this is an overproduction of a lot of new and unique assets and concepts in a situation with a cruel relationship to copyright protections. It's nobody in particulars fault but when I see entire shoddy works like this my impulse is not to move on, my impulse is to possibly rewrite, mod, or otherwise reconfigure these works. It's not 'my work' though to do that, even if I don't get litigated directly it would only take a few days on the announcement of the idea for people to say I'm just plagerizing mechanics from these jams. So it begins to feel less like a culture of cute ideas and passion projects, and more like auto generated hierarchical ideas with which people can 'lay claim' to concepts for future use.
This point of course sounds painfully overambitious from somebody who hasn't made games at all, I'm only describing an unrealized personal impulse here. Yet, if I'm thinking that then its likely a lot of other people are to, and so the drive becomes 'I better stake my flag' rather than producing towards some goal. So I'm left in this awkward spot, on the one hand Love Next Door does everything it sets out to in a comedic tone, on the other hand it feels like a work that by its very existence is negating the future of its own concepts in this way. Has it occurred anybody else that anybody who creates a world featuring a talking candelabra would be under threat from the disney corporation for being too similar to Beauty and the Beast's Lumiere? To add to that, recently Winnie the Pooh finally became public domain but the dark part of it is that it has to be the old antiquated winnie the pooh designs, using the newer cartoon depictions would put you in the slammer. So thus Commander Doore lives and dies in this tiny jam work, this idea of mascots abandoned is a theme I explored so thoroughly in my old Yo! Noid 2 post that saying any more would be begging the point.
These games are clearly not made for mass consumption, it would be absurd to get annoyed at them unless they did something actually offensive. So, i'm only ever frusterated at these works from this viewpoint, an editor with no hope of inclusion, cursed to spectate as ideas get churned and then glazed in amber by the elusive wrath of propertarianism. I want a serious dating door game, I want to have a fictional crush on a door, just as I do on Ponies, and vampires, and all sorts of nonreal monstrosities that we attach ourselves onto! Now it might not happen (like sure you can just say 'well ask for permission then but I'm talking about a systemic problem here...). But my weird desires aside, this post could have been about any small work. It could have been anything. So it might as well be on a weird funny dating game joke that literally nobody cares about. Because hey, even if you think I'm totally off my rocker, at least you get to know that this exists :3
2022
Convulsive Companion
There are parallels to be drawn between hunting game and the proliferation of achievement hunting. As a trend achievement hunting started to pick up steam and become a social resource on the Xbox, a console whose american lineup franchise was military shooters. Over time, this achievement acquisition would become overabundant and doled out in every game as much as possible. Thus the connection between these two modes of 'gaming' began to merge, the 'gaming' of slaughtering a deer to make as a trophy on your wall and the 'gaming' of getting an achievement which dropped 40 gamer points into your xbox live account. Fast forward 15 years and now this has extended to steam achievement percentages breakdowns. How to get 999 armor on slay the spire that only 7 percent of other people have, these obsessions with tracking down 'big game'. Literally 'achievement hunting'.
The killing of animals for sport has always been done as a social activity, after the animal is dead, its customary to take a picture of you next to it or turn it into a 'trophy', display what you gained and then post that gore to all your similarly excited friends. It's important to start by building it up in this way, catch a few fish, then some venison, etc. Then those are really obsessed with gaming might begin to poach for the 'exotic' game. To find and display their experience of stuff nobody else has caught yet, its always an unfair relationship because the gamer has a weapon that the game can't defend against. In this case the game sits there and the artillery is my words. You might be wondering why I'm so adament in this parallel, I think over time database websites and the obsession with 'completion' and 'display' has become analogous, not in morality but in modal relations. This game This is a game sits here innocently and I come by and tear into it noting that I've finished the experience and now I'm going to tell you why it's the downfall of man or instill my own social desires over the 'carcass' of it. Here the carcass is finishing it and telling you about it. Regardless of how good or bad it is I can at best dissect it excitedly for everyone else to see or just broadly smile next to it and give callous words. The result is similar, I'm promoting the concept that its for my use as a persona, that I wield my power over it.
There's a sadistic tendency here I think in this sense, one that is ultimately inescapable and in actual fact even promoted by these platforms. To launder these experiences as a grand concept of selfhood, to enclose the work in your own image. Then this snowballs into developers themselves having to be excited about also taxidermying their projects. Get as much feedback and warp it continuously for their excited audiences. Grafting and patching might as well be one in the same at that point, nothing in place, everything is the alpha production in this sense.
This may seem like a rather pessimistic and extreme way to talk about this 19 year olds rudimentary mario clone, I have no indictments toward them or this work on principle. I cant help but think though that I've continuously been seeing these sorts of freeware projects on Steam instead of Itchio and Gamejolt, wherein Steam asks for a 100$ surcharge with a very poor dynamic for displaying your work on your own terms. Games as commerce become taxidermied more 'cleanly' on steam, the achievements are embbed in, theres these stupid stickers you sell for like 5 cents. I've mentioned this all in my Horny Spell post, the fetid economic dynamics of that shit platform. I've felt this resentment spread though beyond that point. I resent that this work sits here with the same potential to be 'assessed' as everything else here. I resent the fact I'm 'gaming'. I resent gamers. I abhor the destructive impulse that comes with 'analyzing' the obscure. This should probably not even be on here to be 'shot at' in the same way everything else is because this is a prototype, when we shoot snide comments at shit like this it endangers the work through discouragement, which we only feel comfortable doing because we 'completed' it. It feels like I'm killing an exotic being with my words. I resent the fact that even talking about this work opens the possibility that now other people will seek it out and poke fun at it. I don't want any more trophies in my collection. This fundamental shame is hard to move past, to the point that I wrote 6 different versions of this script before giving up. On top of that, it feels also that now I've moved out of the realm of my trophies being endearing and enjoyable, now they seem to disturb people and for good reason. It gets more nuanced than that, but I think this more than anything else is the best vector I can describe this through. It's fundamentally why I need to make my own blog, my own exit. Create a reservation of good 'game' and not a resort for the slaughter of art. There's a better way than this, there has to be.
There are parallels to be drawn between hunting game and the proliferation of achievement hunting. As a trend achievement hunting started to pick up steam and become a social resource on the Xbox, a console whose american lineup franchise was military shooters. Over time, this achievement acquisition would become overabundant and doled out in every game as much as possible. Thus the connection between these two modes of 'gaming' began to merge, the 'gaming' of slaughtering a deer to make as a trophy on your wall and the 'gaming' of getting an achievement which dropped 40 gamer points into your xbox live account. Fast forward 15 years and now this has extended to steam achievement percentages breakdowns. How to get 999 armor on slay the spire that only 7 percent of other people have, these obsessions with tracking down 'big game'. Literally 'achievement hunting'.
The killing of animals for sport has always been done as a social activity, after the animal is dead, its customary to take a picture of you next to it or turn it into a 'trophy', display what you gained and then post that gore to all your similarly excited friends. It's important to start by building it up in this way, catch a few fish, then some venison, etc. Then those are really obsessed with gaming might begin to poach for the 'exotic' game. To find and display their experience of stuff nobody else has caught yet, its always an unfair relationship because the gamer has a weapon that the game can't defend against. In this case the game sits there and the artillery is my words. You might be wondering why I'm so adament in this parallel, I think over time database websites and the obsession with 'completion' and 'display' has become analogous, not in morality but in modal relations. This game This is a game sits here innocently and I come by and tear into it noting that I've finished the experience and now I'm going to tell you why it's the downfall of man or instill my own social desires over the 'carcass' of it. Here the carcass is finishing it and telling you about it. Regardless of how good or bad it is I can at best dissect it excitedly for everyone else to see or just broadly smile next to it and give callous words. The result is similar, I'm promoting the concept that its for my use as a persona, that I wield my power over it.
There's a sadistic tendency here I think in this sense, one that is ultimately inescapable and in actual fact even promoted by these platforms. To launder these experiences as a grand concept of selfhood, to enclose the work in your own image. Then this snowballs into developers themselves having to be excited about also taxidermying their projects. Get as much feedback and warp it continuously for their excited audiences. Grafting and patching might as well be one in the same at that point, nothing in place, everything is the alpha production in this sense.
This may seem like a rather pessimistic and extreme way to talk about this 19 year olds rudimentary mario clone, I have no indictments toward them or this work on principle. I cant help but think though that I've continuously been seeing these sorts of freeware projects on Steam instead of Itchio and Gamejolt, wherein Steam asks for a 100$ surcharge with a very poor dynamic for displaying your work on your own terms. Games as commerce become taxidermied more 'cleanly' on steam, the achievements are embbed in, theres these stupid stickers you sell for like 5 cents. I've mentioned this all in my Horny Spell post, the fetid economic dynamics of that shit platform. I've felt this resentment spread though beyond that point. I resent that this work sits here with the same potential to be 'assessed' as everything else here. I resent the fact I'm 'gaming'. I resent gamers. I abhor the destructive impulse that comes with 'analyzing' the obscure. This should probably not even be on here to be 'shot at' in the same way everything else is because this is a prototype, when we shoot snide comments at shit like this it endangers the work through discouragement, which we only feel comfortable doing because we 'completed' it. It feels like I'm killing an exotic being with my words. I resent the fact that even talking about this work opens the possibility that now other people will seek it out and poke fun at it. I don't want any more trophies in my collection. This fundamental shame is hard to move past, to the point that I wrote 6 different versions of this script before giving up. On top of that, it feels also that now I've moved out of the realm of my trophies being endearing and enjoyable, now they seem to disturb people and for good reason. It gets more nuanced than that, but I think this more than anything else is the best vector I can describe this through. It's fundamentally why I need to make my own blog, my own exit. Create a reservation of good 'game' and not a resort for the slaughter of art. There's a better way than this, there has to be.