Erato_Heti
2022
Energy Drink Companion
While the low fi beats to sleep to aesthetic of this represents as a decent introductory reference point for building confidence that rhythm games aren't that hard. It would be a tenuous one, since as Patricia covers it doesn't introduce the concept of sycopation at all, its just a 'clap along' game with several different inputs.
It's interesting to see that people are bringing up comparisons to rhythm heaven because in actual fact I think this game only 'works' if you dont know that game exists and dont get access to it. I might not ever beat rhythm heaven but even what I've played of it I know its way more engaging than this is. For instance in the first 3 levels of Rhythm Heaven you have tap, drag, hold input varience introduction. In Melatonin you dont have that level of varience introduced until 10 levels in. Melatonin wants to be easy in order to guide the player through its highly cultivated visual experience rather than test the player. Sure I got stumped in a few situations but only because it relies so heavily on visual clap along that are often unclear. It became at most a matter of resetting once or twice. Meanwhile in rhythm heaven you might get stuck on a level for a while and might even have to redo the ealier ones again.
So if it relies so heavily on its visual stimulus what is there to say about it? Well the funny thing about trying to write around visual art is that any reader could easily just look at it and decide for themselves which is why I tend not to focus on that too much in most of my write ups. Here though its worth stressing that when you actually are enveloped in this pastel wonderland and having to input in response to it, its appalling. There are a few cases where they remove the visual stimulus like for example in the Mind level where the character gets sleepy and you only see a fraction of the screen. It becomes more bearable to play in this condition. It's often better to input based on sound queues to instead of simple visual responses for a few of the levels as well
The symbolism itself is also both trite and exceptionally late capitalist in its blunt depiction of a dreamscape as economically fueled. There's no surrealism in this, this isn't utilizing the bizzare of dream logic or its distress in the way Un Chien Andalou or firths Sock series would, we aren't working with the dream brush of a Dali here. We aren't even working with a disneyesque one ala Alice and Wonderland (1951). It's a collagan mash of Late Burton and the weakest late 10's cartoon network animation (Bee and Puppycat and We Bare Bears).
If you can believe it theres also some frusterating UI choices to. If you beat the combination levels at the end of each night and press the button you are throw immediately into the 'hard mode' version, but you can bypass it by just going to the map. If you aren't playing the hard mode versions of the levels before, why would you want to now. If you want to go back to try levels from previous nights you would have to rifle through a bunch of menus to get there to even look at a section of them, rather than just have it be a simple overworld. Trying to make the overworld 'immersive' at the expense of actually being able to just discern which levels you've done is one element I complained about in my Pizza Tower diagnostic. I was being nice about it there but now I'm just enourmously frusterated in retrospect, if you are proud of your level design why stuff it away in a cupboard like that? A non-discerning eye might try to blame it on something like Mario Galaxy for introducing the idea of an immersive hubworld. I would actually say this is more the consequences of even earlier Mario games (World, 3, etc.) and its 'nostalgic' reintroduction recently with the 3D World titles. If I felt any softness for either of these two games, that it had a rare moment where I was enjoying it. Its been sullied by treating their own gamespace in such a segmented fashion. Even with the game as short as it is, there should be as little interrupting me from entering levels as possible. It's a design approach that puts the idea of difficulty scaling over any desire for mastery. What it ends up incentivizing is not a gratification of completing certain sections but instead, fully restarting from the beggining and going as perfect as you can through each.
What we have is a game too afraid to commit either to strange visual abudance or difficulty scaling. Trapped in a limbo of their own curation, your protagonist limbers in a wasteland of millenial tropes. Letting tindr and monster energy imprint into thier headspace while they continue the stereotypes of Avacado Toast consumption. While the stereotype never arises to a level of offensiveness that a racial one does, its nonetheless irritating and vacuous. If its a parody of that landscape, its too cheeky to stand for anything.
If anybody accuses you of not engaging with art outside your comfort zone, I give you permission to roll your eyes and throw something like this at them, ask if this is what they want you to try out instead. If it is, dont let them pester you. No need to have such a somambulant relationship with the world.
While the low fi beats to sleep to aesthetic of this represents as a decent introductory reference point for building confidence that rhythm games aren't that hard. It would be a tenuous one, since as Patricia covers it doesn't introduce the concept of sycopation at all, its just a 'clap along' game with several different inputs.
It's interesting to see that people are bringing up comparisons to rhythm heaven because in actual fact I think this game only 'works' if you dont know that game exists and dont get access to it. I might not ever beat rhythm heaven but even what I've played of it I know its way more engaging than this is. For instance in the first 3 levels of Rhythm Heaven you have tap, drag, hold input varience introduction. In Melatonin you dont have that level of varience introduced until 10 levels in. Melatonin wants to be easy in order to guide the player through its highly cultivated visual experience rather than test the player. Sure I got stumped in a few situations but only because it relies so heavily on visual clap along that are often unclear. It became at most a matter of resetting once or twice. Meanwhile in rhythm heaven you might get stuck on a level for a while and might even have to redo the ealier ones again.
So if it relies so heavily on its visual stimulus what is there to say about it? Well the funny thing about trying to write around visual art is that any reader could easily just look at it and decide for themselves which is why I tend not to focus on that too much in most of my write ups. Here though its worth stressing that when you actually are enveloped in this pastel wonderland and having to input in response to it, its appalling. There are a few cases where they remove the visual stimulus like for example in the Mind level where the character gets sleepy and you only see a fraction of the screen. It becomes more bearable to play in this condition. It's often better to input based on sound queues to instead of simple visual responses for a few of the levels as well
The symbolism itself is also both trite and exceptionally late capitalist in its blunt depiction of a dreamscape as economically fueled. There's no surrealism in this, this isn't utilizing the bizzare of dream logic or its distress in the way Un Chien Andalou or firths Sock series would, we aren't working with the dream brush of a Dali here. We aren't even working with a disneyesque one ala Alice and Wonderland (1951). It's a collagan mash of Late Burton and the weakest late 10's cartoon network animation (Bee and Puppycat and We Bare Bears).
If you can believe it theres also some frusterating UI choices to. If you beat the combination levels at the end of each night and press the button you are throw immediately into the 'hard mode' version, but you can bypass it by just going to the map. If you aren't playing the hard mode versions of the levels before, why would you want to now. If you want to go back to try levels from previous nights you would have to rifle through a bunch of menus to get there to even look at a section of them, rather than just have it be a simple overworld. Trying to make the overworld 'immersive' at the expense of actually being able to just discern which levels you've done is one element I complained about in my Pizza Tower diagnostic. I was being nice about it there but now I'm just enourmously frusterated in retrospect, if you are proud of your level design why stuff it away in a cupboard like that? A non-discerning eye might try to blame it on something like Mario Galaxy for introducing the idea of an immersive hubworld. I would actually say this is more the consequences of even earlier Mario games (World, 3, etc.) and its 'nostalgic' reintroduction recently with the 3D World titles. If I felt any softness for either of these two games, that it had a rare moment where I was enjoying it. Its been sullied by treating their own gamespace in such a segmented fashion. Even with the game as short as it is, there should be as little interrupting me from entering levels as possible. It's a design approach that puts the idea of difficulty scaling over any desire for mastery. What it ends up incentivizing is not a gratification of completing certain sections but instead, fully restarting from the beggining and going as perfect as you can through each.
What we have is a game too afraid to commit either to strange visual abudance or difficulty scaling. Trapped in a limbo of their own curation, your protagonist limbers in a wasteland of millenial tropes. Letting tindr and monster energy imprint into thier headspace while they continue the stereotypes of Avacado Toast consumption. While the stereotype never arises to a level of offensiveness that a racial one does, its nonetheless irritating and vacuous. If its a parody of that landscape, its too cheeky to stand for anything.
If anybody accuses you of not engaging with art outside your comfort zone, I give you permission to roll your eyes and throw something like this at them, ask if this is what they want you to try out instead. If it is, dont let them pester you. No need to have such a somambulant relationship with the world.
2017
I had this sort of sad realization that Dominion as a digital version of a competative deck building board game reveals through its graceful implementation that all of the benefits of CCG's can be found through a board game with none of the setbacks usually associated with it. People mired in the discussion around game design cringe when hearing the word 'metaprogression'. It's a term that has become stapled to gaming as a whole but in particular CCGs and Roguelites. For those not in the loop its basically a term to describe how a player gets new advantages inside the game by doing various things outside that game space, be it microtransactions or repeated play. For instance, sometimes you might see a pop up appear that you unlocked a new card or item added to a run after playing a round, thats a textbook example of metaprogression.
Most people who are interested in games from either a design perspective fork into two categories: Those who love metaprogression and those who avoid it. It's the ultimate form of using games as treadmill entertainment, where you play the game to get more stuff to play the game better (Hades, Vampire Survivors, Binding of Isaac etc). This by design filters out most people who are impatient who want access to everything a game has to offer or want a cultivated experience like DOOM etc. Thus the distribution of player interest is people either avoiding them entirely in respect of their time or treating each game they pick up as a special interest to throw themselves at single mindedly for a while. Metaprogression has baked in a sense of continuous novelty, without leaving the player overwhelmed. It has some of the best onramping for getting players into the game and building their sense of confidence with it over time. One irony here though is that there's a degree of upkeep that often goes into that knowledge. If you get really far into a game that uses this practice and put it down for few months, you will usually come back stressed or bewildered wondering how you ever even got that far in the first place. This is without even getting into the fact that metaprogression design often throttles difficulty curve based on your familiarity with the genre its in.
CCG's seem chemically concocted to tap into this phenomenon, adding a competative factor to the ordeal. In order to get better at a CCG you have to slowly acquire more of the cards so you can use them in the next fight. This scarcity when combined with the social aspect means that there's a heirarchy of information. New players must rely on established players to figure out more about the game if the metaprogression is slow enough. On top of that, if the player feels like they are figuring out the game faster than the reasources they are begin given then that might urge them into wanting to buy cards to play at less of a disadvantage against other players. The need for information upkeep due to balance changes reinforces the hierarchy, causing established know at all players to look down on everyone else (I talked about this a bit in my Undercards for those that read it, but here I'm trying to illustrate that it might be even more fundamental of a process in CCG design).
I bring this dynamic up to say that we often don't realize what sort of curse we are living in until its too late. Dominion Online substitutes this ultimately cruel metaprogression hierarchy by simply giving all the players equal access to all the cards at the start of any game and putting a subscription fee on playing around with the advanced sets yourself. Each game every player has access to the same set of cards known as the supply pile, and your goal is to figure out how to build and buy to make a deck to beat your opponent then and there. The playing field is totally equal on that level, and with over 300 cards cards that can be mixed and matched before a game, the options of what to mix and match are near infinite. Meaning that there's a high skill cieling without all the gatekeeping and scarcity associated with it. Dominion Online is an excercise in alternative perspectives on competition. By opening up the floodgates and allowing everyone access to the same pool from the outset you don't have to worry so much about playing for a compulsory attainment of external resources.
Dominion represents a novel approach to a more 'old fashioned' board game understanding of game design: Be fair to all the players. There is no asymmetry or treadmilling to mess with players, the only distinction is just in how specifically knowledgeable a player is over the other and even that doesn't guarantee a game. It goes without saying I love the game, but there's an illusive modesty to it that is hard to put down. Even in spite of their obvious immediate unfairness and economically produced FOMO, I still have this urge to play and get good at a CCG. Perhaps one reason why is the idea of such self assured confidence in that hierarchy feels fun to try and upturn, but usually you just end up getting consumed into it or ostracized regardless. Perhaps it's also the history of CCGs as being related to high octane anime soap operas. The fact that you have to prepare and work towards a deck ahead of time adds a theatrical factor that disaffected quiet dweebs can hook onto. For millenials, YuGiOh showed us characters like Yugi an Kaiba duking it out for some esoteric set of purposes, the 'heart of the cards'. However when thought about within its more realistic competitive aspect this is just an advertising gimmick for a toy that has likely put me and a lot of other people in a state of arrested development with competition.
Is this a problem outside of multiplayer games, does it carry over at all? I'd say so. For instance one game that has a pretty hefty relationship to metaprogression is Vampire Survivors, a game I'm rather infamous for writing on. In that game, you have to choose from a series of options and wait around for 30 real time minutes for a game to complete. The treadmilling though is that when you start playing nothing is unlocked, no character buffs or options, you see a screen where every character is loocked out but 1. Even if you win you still get 'killed'. If we consider this seriously, this is no different from when you're playing an incremental game and have to press that button to 'start over' with a small buff. The 'real ending' is webbed behind layers and layers of metaprogression. You know even if you beat the game, you didn't really beat it, there's so much more to see. It might not seem like there is an issue here but this slow doling out of new tools and information means that in order for you to make progress on the games terms you have to almost adopt it as an identity, a hyperfixation. I bring this up because when I wrote about this game the first time around, there were quite a lot of people who felt defensive in support of it, unusually so. Of course, it take 30+ hours of very grating and monotonous play in order to unlock everything so of course they felt that way. Realistically I'm not that far different, for a long time I was defensive about Binding of Isaac, because that game had become a 2nd skin, completing its increasingly opaque challenges became my life, I spent years playing it, I felt invested. Which is exactly the problem, that's unusual, or at least should be. This hyperfixative quality has caused an intense myopia on a realistic discussion.
In both instances, metaprogression design is the primary culprit here. There are engines of YuGiOh you can download and play that give you access to all of the cards instantly, but then it sets in immediately just how overcomplicated the game is. For social games it seems in theory like it should make sense to suppress this urge with meta progression design but that's only an illusion in form, because the other player you're fighting now has a high variance of access to that information and may know the game inside out better than you at any point. It's just a warm blanket for the eventual information overabundance you'd have to take on. If it's not that then its timegating, causing you to want to obsess over the game to anybody in speaking distance. One of the best games to utilize metaprogression I've seen is Desktop Dungeons (2013) which had a simple 5-10 puzzle game session and only 4 - 6 hours worth of unlocks to do. That game came out 10 years ago now, and roguelike games with such a small span of time to get through it now is rare.
Now that I've highlighted it in the depth I have, its no wonder that most of my friends these days avoid these sorts of games to my bewilderment. They often just see through this illusion and don't appreciate what's behind the curtain. That's not to say they are right or 'superior' per se, all art is ultimately about illusions. They just prefer their illusions to not corrode at their time so much or hide as much of the mechanical depth from them. They would rather up front the cost of having to read through a manual so they can enjoy the tools at their disposal more. I think there is room for CCGs and metaprogression to work right, but it would have to be much more thoughtfully designed. For instance you would have to replace the F2Play model of most CCGs with buying the multiplayer game fixed price for everyone from the outset, and then just using metaprogression as a fast onramp into the game rather than as a way to gatekeep players from progress (...from a side glance this seems to be what Friends vs Friends (2023) is doing but I can't say for sure). More to the point is that as now this approach is incredibly rare because its not the 'profitable' approach). The same is likely true for roguelikes in most instances. If we are going to have metaprogression mechanics at all, it should correlate to either the complexity of the game and probably should not take so long to unlock. In the meantime I think it's worth reconsidering on a more fundamental level games with metaprogression elements, they've become so normalized over the years I think we forget they are supposed to be the exception, not the rule.
Most people who are interested in games from either a design perspective fork into two categories: Those who love metaprogression and those who avoid it. It's the ultimate form of using games as treadmill entertainment, where you play the game to get more stuff to play the game better (Hades, Vampire Survivors, Binding of Isaac etc). This by design filters out most people who are impatient who want access to everything a game has to offer or want a cultivated experience like DOOM etc. Thus the distribution of player interest is people either avoiding them entirely in respect of their time or treating each game they pick up as a special interest to throw themselves at single mindedly for a while. Metaprogression has baked in a sense of continuous novelty, without leaving the player overwhelmed. It has some of the best onramping for getting players into the game and building their sense of confidence with it over time. One irony here though is that there's a degree of upkeep that often goes into that knowledge. If you get really far into a game that uses this practice and put it down for few months, you will usually come back stressed or bewildered wondering how you ever even got that far in the first place. This is without even getting into the fact that metaprogression design often throttles difficulty curve based on your familiarity with the genre its in.
CCG's seem chemically concocted to tap into this phenomenon, adding a competative factor to the ordeal. In order to get better at a CCG you have to slowly acquire more of the cards so you can use them in the next fight. This scarcity when combined with the social aspect means that there's a heirarchy of information. New players must rely on established players to figure out more about the game if the metaprogression is slow enough. On top of that, if the player feels like they are figuring out the game faster than the reasources they are begin given then that might urge them into wanting to buy cards to play at less of a disadvantage against other players. The need for information upkeep due to balance changes reinforces the hierarchy, causing established know at all players to look down on everyone else (I talked about this a bit in my Undercards for those that read it, but here I'm trying to illustrate that it might be even more fundamental of a process in CCG design).
I bring this dynamic up to say that we often don't realize what sort of curse we are living in until its too late. Dominion Online substitutes this ultimately cruel metaprogression hierarchy by simply giving all the players equal access to all the cards at the start of any game and putting a subscription fee on playing around with the advanced sets yourself. Each game every player has access to the same set of cards known as the supply pile, and your goal is to figure out how to build and buy to make a deck to beat your opponent then and there. The playing field is totally equal on that level, and with over 300 cards cards that can be mixed and matched before a game, the options of what to mix and match are near infinite. Meaning that there's a high skill cieling without all the gatekeeping and scarcity associated with it. Dominion Online is an excercise in alternative perspectives on competition. By opening up the floodgates and allowing everyone access to the same pool from the outset you don't have to worry so much about playing for a compulsory attainment of external resources.
Dominion represents a novel approach to a more 'old fashioned' board game understanding of game design: Be fair to all the players. There is no asymmetry or treadmilling to mess with players, the only distinction is just in how specifically knowledgeable a player is over the other and even that doesn't guarantee a game. It goes without saying I love the game, but there's an illusive modesty to it that is hard to put down. Even in spite of their obvious immediate unfairness and economically produced FOMO, I still have this urge to play and get good at a CCG. Perhaps one reason why is the idea of such self assured confidence in that hierarchy feels fun to try and upturn, but usually you just end up getting consumed into it or ostracized regardless. Perhaps it's also the history of CCGs as being related to high octane anime soap operas. The fact that you have to prepare and work towards a deck ahead of time adds a theatrical factor that disaffected quiet dweebs can hook onto. For millenials, YuGiOh showed us characters like Yugi an Kaiba duking it out for some esoteric set of purposes, the 'heart of the cards'. However when thought about within its more realistic competitive aspect this is just an advertising gimmick for a toy that has likely put me and a lot of other people in a state of arrested development with competition.
Is this a problem outside of multiplayer games, does it carry over at all? I'd say so. For instance one game that has a pretty hefty relationship to metaprogression is Vampire Survivors, a game I'm rather infamous for writing on. In that game, you have to choose from a series of options and wait around for 30 real time minutes for a game to complete. The treadmilling though is that when you start playing nothing is unlocked, no character buffs or options, you see a screen where every character is loocked out but 1. Even if you win you still get 'killed'. If we consider this seriously, this is no different from when you're playing an incremental game and have to press that button to 'start over' with a small buff. The 'real ending' is webbed behind layers and layers of metaprogression. You know even if you beat the game, you didn't really beat it, there's so much more to see. It might not seem like there is an issue here but this slow doling out of new tools and information means that in order for you to make progress on the games terms you have to almost adopt it as an identity, a hyperfixation. I bring this up because when I wrote about this game the first time around, there were quite a lot of people who felt defensive in support of it, unusually so. Of course, it take 30+ hours of very grating and monotonous play in order to unlock everything so of course they felt that way. Realistically I'm not that far different, for a long time I was defensive about Binding of Isaac, because that game had become a 2nd skin, completing its increasingly opaque challenges became my life, I spent years playing it, I felt invested. Which is exactly the problem, that's unusual, or at least should be. This hyperfixative quality has caused an intense myopia on a realistic discussion.
In both instances, metaprogression design is the primary culprit here. There are engines of YuGiOh you can download and play that give you access to all of the cards instantly, but then it sets in immediately just how overcomplicated the game is. For social games it seems in theory like it should make sense to suppress this urge with meta progression design but that's only an illusion in form, because the other player you're fighting now has a high variance of access to that information and may know the game inside out better than you at any point. It's just a warm blanket for the eventual information overabundance you'd have to take on. If it's not that then its timegating, causing you to want to obsess over the game to anybody in speaking distance. One of the best games to utilize metaprogression I've seen is Desktop Dungeons (2013) which had a simple 5-10 puzzle game session and only 4 - 6 hours worth of unlocks to do. That game came out 10 years ago now, and roguelike games with such a small span of time to get through it now is rare.
Now that I've highlighted it in the depth I have, its no wonder that most of my friends these days avoid these sorts of games to my bewilderment. They often just see through this illusion and don't appreciate what's behind the curtain. That's not to say they are right or 'superior' per se, all art is ultimately about illusions. They just prefer their illusions to not corrode at their time so much or hide as much of the mechanical depth from them. They would rather up front the cost of having to read through a manual so they can enjoy the tools at their disposal more. I think there is room for CCGs and metaprogression to work right, but it would have to be much more thoughtfully designed. For instance you would have to replace the F2Play model of most CCGs with buying the multiplayer game fixed price for everyone from the outset, and then just using metaprogression as a fast onramp into the game rather than as a way to gatekeep players from progress (...from a side glance this seems to be what Friends vs Friends (2023) is doing but I can't say for sure). More to the point is that as now this approach is incredibly rare because its not the 'profitable' approach). The same is likely true for roguelikes in most instances. If we are going to have metaprogression mechanics at all, it should correlate to either the complexity of the game and probably should not take so long to unlock. In the meantime I think it's worth reconsidering on a more fundamental level games with metaprogression elements, they've become so normalized over the years I think we forget they are supposed to be the exception, not the rule.
2023
đź–•đź–•đź–•đź–•đź–• Fuck This đź–•đź–•đź–•đź–•đź–•
I think this utilization of indie devs as a guerilla advertising force is enormously fucked up. It'll almost definitely dilute the indie scene and what videogames we talk about going forward. However, it's nothing new, in the sense that liscensed flash game shlock to sell products have been around forever (remember those LCD happy meal games? It's just like that but updated). It's a polished face to an age-old exploitation. Instead of giving the substanceless game the respect of actually getting direct scorn, which would ultimately embolden the product's aim of attention grabbing. Or otherwise meming around the existence of this which would flaccidly play right into its hands. Let's do a more 'macro informative' approach. Here's some interesting articles on recent abuses from the company in question to sate the appetite a bit:
Pandemic Racism
"McDonald’s actions speak louder than words. The reality is that 80 percent of McDonald’s majority Black and Brown workforce don’t have access to paid sick leave. That is dangerous under normal circumstances; during a global pandemic, it’s deadly." McDonald’s is Hiding Policies That Perpetuate Systemic Racism Behind Woke-Washing
Sexual Harrassment
"According to the lawsuit, since at least 2017, AMTCR knew about sexual harassment and allowed it to continue, unabated, by supervisors, managers, and coworkers at various of its McDonald’s restaurants. The harassing conduct, which was mainly directed at young, teenage employees, included frequent unwanted touching, offensive comments, unwelcome sexual advances, and intimidation. As AMTCR failed to adequately address the complaints of sexual harassment, many workers found the working conditions so intolerable that they had no choice but to quit." McDonald’s Franchise to Pay Nearly $2 Million to Settle EEOC Sexual Harassment Lawsuit
Corporate Malfeseance
"According to the SEC’s order, McDonald’s terminated Easterbrook for exercising poor judgment and engaging in an inappropriate personal relationship with a McDonald’s employee in violation of company policy. However, McDonald’s and Easterbrook entered into a separation agreement that concluded his termination was without cause, which allowed him to retain substantial equity compensation that otherwise would have been forfeited." SEC Charges McDonald’s Former CEO for Misrepresentations About His Termination
Check out The McDonald's Videogame (2006) by the dev team Molleindustria using Flashpoint to foster a better understanding of these corporate ghouls.
I think this utilization of indie devs as a guerilla advertising force is enormously fucked up. It'll almost definitely dilute the indie scene and what videogames we talk about going forward. However, it's nothing new, in the sense that liscensed flash game shlock to sell products have been around forever (remember those LCD happy meal games? It's just like that but updated). It's a polished face to an age-old exploitation. Instead of giving the substanceless game the respect of actually getting direct scorn, which would ultimately embolden the product's aim of attention grabbing. Or otherwise meming around the existence of this which would flaccidly play right into its hands. Let's do a more 'macro informative' approach. Here's some interesting articles on recent abuses from the company in question to sate the appetite a bit:
Pandemic Racism
"McDonald’s actions speak louder than words. The reality is that 80 percent of McDonald’s majority Black and Brown workforce don’t have access to paid sick leave. That is dangerous under normal circumstances; during a global pandemic, it’s deadly." McDonald’s is Hiding Policies That Perpetuate Systemic Racism Behind Woke-Washing
Sexual Harrassment
"According to the lawsuit, since at least 2017, AMTCR knew about sexual harassment and allowed it to continue, unabated, by supervisors, managers, and coworkers at various of its McDonald’s restaurants. The harassing conduct, which was mainly directed at young, teenage employees, included frequent unwanted touching, offensive comments, unwelcome sexual advances, and intimidation. As AMTCR failed to adequately address the complaints of sexual harassment, many workers found the working conditions so intolerable that they had no choice but to quit." McDonald’s Franchise to Pay Nearly $2 Million to Settle EEOC Sexual Harassment Lawsuit
Corporate Malfeseance
"According to the SEC’s order, McDonald’s terminated Easterbrook for exercising poor judgment and engaging in an inappropriate personal relationship with a McDonald’s employee in violation of company policy. However, McDonald’s and Easterbrook entered into a separation agreement that concluded his termination was without cause, which allowed him to retain substantial equity compensation that otherwise would have been forfeited." SEC Charges McDonald’s Former CEO for Misrepresentations About His Termination
Check out The McDonald's Videogame (2006) by the dev team Molleindustria using Flashpoint to foster a better understanding of these corporate ghouls.
Lounge Companion
Almost as if in tone with this, I just wrote a good 4 paragraphs breaking down the math and average player rate from my bed until I accidentally cntrl a'd and backspaced it all by accident.
People are often too quick to disparage works that are 'annoying on purpose' like this for being shallow and teaching you something you supposedly already know. Yet I never see those know it alls actually bring these 'obvious truths' up when critiqueing other games, especially idlers or roguelites. In particular when rng threshold to win/wait mechanics are introduced. This depicts a more honest and upfront depiction of the gambling machine, it shows the humoring warmth and ambience while letting you actually fully internalize the futility of certain probablity thresholds in real time. The only thing here I think is subpar is the sarcastic commentary that appears under the button which is on the whole memetic and lacking. Even there, Elendow reminds you you are playing and they made the game along with reminding you you can take a break. There's a strong emphasis on trying to not make the player get sucked into the repetitive task at expense of their wellness while still maintaining a strong educational point. I prefer this immensely over the more sneering games of torment like Valefish's Crypt or that Baby ending in Stanley Parable, I think a lot of people don't realize how poorly thought through for player wellness these games tend to be. Instead putting addictive or stubborn play onto the player as a 'personal responsibility' rather than seeing a game designer as a serious preventative occupation. I will sound bitter here, but that's why I stopped bothering trying to write so effortfully on here all the time, whats the point if people think probability thresholds talk is 'histrionic'. It's rarely internalized, so at some point you just gotta put on the shades go out for a drive and stop trying. Props to this guy for making a point through a game structure instead.
Almost as if in tone with this, I just wrote a good 4 paragraphs breaking down the math and average player rate from my bed until I accidentally cntrl a'd and backspaced it all by accident.
People are often too quick to disparage works that are 'annoying on purpose' like this for being shallow and teaching you something you supposedly already know. Yet I never see those know it alls actually bring these 'obvious truths' up when critiqueing other games, especially idlers or roguelites. In particular when rng threshold to win/wait mechanics are introduced. This depicts a more honest and upfront depiction of the gambling machine, it shows the humoring warmth and ambience while letting you actually fully internalize the futility of certain probablity thresholds in real time. The only thing here I think is subpar is the sarcastic commentary that appears under the button which is on the whole memetic and lacking. Even there, Elendow reminds you you are playing and they made the game along with reminding you you can take a break. There's a strong emphasis on trying to not make the player get sucked into the repetitive task at expense of their wellness while still maintaining a strong educational point. I prefer this immensely over the more sneering games of torment like Valefish's Crypt or that Baby ending in Stanley Parable, I think a lot of people don't realize how poorly thought through for player wellness these games tend to be. Instead putting addictive or stubborn play onto the player as a 'personal responsibility' rather than seeing a game designer as a serious preventative occupation. I will sound bitter here, but that's why I stopped bothering trying to write so effortfully on here all the time, whats the point if people think probability thresholds talk is 'histrionic'. It's rarely internalized, so at some point you just gotta put on the shades go out for a drive and stop trying. Props to this guy for making a point through a game structure instead.
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.
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
2021
Suprise Forest Encounter!
Man or Muppet (2021) is a great performance on how certain forms of nostalgia and memory weave as associations within the contemporary mind. First you have a problem, in this case the feeling that your identity is fragmented from people excluding you based on your body. Then you reach through the mind to find various media reference points to associate that to. I feel like this is worth stating boldly because even in other essay games that I do like, the sincerity of this form of memory is fairly uncommon, at best the form will be presented as mundane and then in the last moment revelatory which can wear out as a trope especially in a digital world of clickbait and 'revealing'. I praised the admittedly quite weepy and sordid He Fucked the Girl Out of Me (2022) for touching on this concept of 'unpacking' a memory through referentiality before, yet obviously the contexts between both games are a bit different. This is about the abstraction of a problem and its representation in media experiences, rather than a pure biopic on media itself as you might see in see Crime Life Crime Wave (2021). Describing the trans alienation through pastiche successfully defines the space of the problem being worked through.
On a more technical note, HotelBones was really clever in utilizing video as an interactive overlay to rifle through here. You can choose to stick around with the muppets during certain moments in the essay for as long as you like, thereby inverting one of the main dissonances within narrative driven gaming. To illustrate if I'm playing a game and have control over the movement of my character I can simply choose to not move for a long amount of time and thereby break the immersion if even so slightly. Here, the 'character' is just a thought abstraction you're piloting. Instead the desire to linger is shown as meditational. These videos are all equally situated as cultural memories, some wonderful and others awful, but all in reference to the main point.
There's a specific hard to articulate aura about this. It's the plunderphonics stream of conciousness. To explain what I mean, allow me a small anecdote. I spoke to the creator once before about how I have 'Glover Circus level 1 brain' and her immediate response was that it was an awesome metaphor and she would love to play a game about that, an urge to represent that which would be strange to anybody else just 'makes sense' to people who immerse themselves in this style of thinking. The disorders of life are immediately understood through analogue reference and I think we are often trying to hard to avoid how often our minds really are like this because it would freak us out. Yet, if this project shows anything aside from its central thesis, it's that embracing this weird part of our brain that compresses the media we overconsume into reference points is maybe what we should be doing instead. Like yeah the game is good and I agree with it, but there's a profound form of bohemianism I find here that is worth putting a spotlight on.
As I see it you have 3 primary interactive psychological 'bohemian' relationships with games.
1. 'Hatemusement' where you interact through often 'enraged' amusement and confusion (Puzzle game frustrations, The Angry Nintendo Nerd)
2. The observational and rather clinical approach thoroughness of a work in itself (LP Archives, Matthewmatosis and his clones, most long posts people like on BL)
3. The sentimentalist approach that sees art in terms of profound immersion that is trying to get you to enjoy it.
1 and 2 are spoken for, and are to a large extent most of what gaming culture is dominated by, but the niche scene artists like HotelBones and Bagenzo are working from, speak for this much more faint relationship to gaming and art in general. As an internal memory wistfulness. I'm not the best at speaking towards it myself, in part because I think text is actually too limited a form to do it successfully. For instance I've attempted it in my Pagan: Autogeny post, which while I'm not fully unhappy with feels much too much like a 'one off' for me to adopt as much as I like just yet, I feel too 'anecdotal' doing it at the moment. That said I see a lot to love in the sentimentalist approach to art and feel a deeply passive sense of endearment and love of media from others that do perform it. As I feel my memories fragmenting and falling into disarray, wartorn by overindulgence in disparate media and failed attempts at community the candidness of these pieces and how they work keep me anchored at bay from feeling that its all totally useless ^-^
Also this is a great if you're furry or furry adjacent because it exposes that human bodies are disturbing to begin with fundamentally. I'm down with that. If it was up to me we would probably all be covered in fur I'm ngl.
Man or Muppet (2021) is a great performance on how certain forms of nostalgia and memory weave as associations within the contemporary mind. First you have a problem, in this case the feeling that your identity is fragmented from people excluding you based on your body. Then you reach through the mind to find various media reference points to associate that to. I feel like this is worth stating boldly because even in other essay games that I do like, the sincerity of this form of memory is fairly uncommon, at best the form will be presented as mundane and then in the last moment revelatory which can wear out as a trope especially in a digital world of clickbait and 'revealing'. I praised the admittedly quite weepy and sordid He Fucked the Girl Out of Me (2022) for touching on this concept of 'unpacking' a memory through referentiality before, yet obviously the contexts between both games are a bit different. This is about the abstraction of a problem and its representation in media experiences, rather than a pure biopic on media itself as you might see in see Crime Life Crime Wave (2021). Describing the trans alienation through pastiche successfully defines the space of the problem being worked through.
On a more technical note, HotelBones was really clever in utilizing video as an interactive overlay to rifle through here. You can choose to stick around with the muppets during certain moments in the essay for as long as you like, thereby inverting one of the main dissonances within narrative driven gaming. To illustrate if I'm playing a game and have control over the movement of my character I can simply choose to not move for a long amount of time and thereby break the immersion if even so slightly. Here, the 'character' is just a thought abstraction you're piloting. Instead the desire to linger is shown as meditational. These videos are all equally situated as cultural memories, some wonderful and others awful, but all in reference to the main point.
There's a specific hard to articulate aura about this. It's the plunderphonics stream of conciousness. To explain what I mean, allow me a small anecdote. I spoke to the creator once before about how I have 'Glover Circus level 1 brain' and her immediate response was that it was an awesome metaphor and she would love to play a game about that, an urge to represent that which would be strange to anybody else just 'makes sense' to people who immerse themselves in this style of thinking. The disorders of life are immediately understood through analogue reference and I think we are often trying to hard to avoid how often our minds really are like this because it would freak us out. Yet, if this project shows anything aside from its central thesis, it's that embracing this weird part of our brain that compresses the media we overconsume into reference points is maybe what we should be doing instead. Like yeah the game is good and I agree with it, but there's a profound form of bohemianism I find here that is worth putting a spotlight on.
As I see it you have 3 primary interactive psychological 'bohemian' relationships with games.
1. 'Hatemusement' where you interact through often 'enraged' amusement and confusion (Puzzle game frustrations, The Angry Nintendo Nerd)
2. The observational and rather clinical approach thoroughness of a work in itself (LP Archives, Matthewmatosis and his clones, most long posts people like on BL)
3. The sentimentalist approach that sees art in terms of profound immersion that is trying to get you to enjoy it.
1 and 2 are spoken for, and are to a large extent most of what gaming culture is dominated by, but the niche scene artists like HotelBones and Bagenzo are working from, speak for this much more faint relationship to gaming and art in general. As an internal memory wistfulness. I'm not the best at speaking towards it myself, in part because I think text is actually too limited a form to do it successfully. For instance I've attempted it in my Pagan: Autogeny post, which while I'm not fully unhappy with feels much too much like a 'one off' for me to adopt as much as I like just yet, I feel too 'anecdotal' doing it at the moment. That said I see a lot to love in the sentimentalist approach to art and feel a deeply passive sense of endearment and love of media from others that do perform it. As I feel my memories fragmenting and falling into disarray, wartorn by overindulgence in disparate media and failed attempts at community the candidness of these pieces and how they work keep me anchored at bay from feeling that its all totally useless ^-^
Also this is a great if you're furry or furry adjacent because it exposes that human bodies are disturbing to begin with fundamentally. I'm down with that. If it was up to me we would probably all be covered in fur I'm ngl.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
"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
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.