got me thinking, among other things, about the various priorities the 3d platformer can take on...been playing this a bit in tandem with what is shaping up to be my first full playthru of mario 64 (and with sephonie as the most recent 3d platformer ive returned to) and i feel like they all illustrate some kind of imaginary rubric that u can place most of not all 3d platformers on. mario 64 here represents games that prioritize the Player Character above all else, famously slaved over for total perfection before a single real level was ever made...i'd say games like Demon Turf and Pseudoregalia pick up this torch the most. sephonie is for me the undisputed peak of the focus being the world itself, in a physical geometrical way...every move in ur toolkit is about interacting with specifically the space, u cant accomplish nearly as much in an empty room as u can with games in that first category. cavern of dreams then is a herald for games that mainly prioritize the world, but as Context rather then Shapes. its super super refreshing tbh...the spaces are about as far from abstraction as u can get despite how surreal and impossible they are. thinking about places and objects as Themselves are essential for solving the puzzles, which are the main focus here and an absolute delight...so many moments of realization were paired with a joyful smile. also super adorable and crittery, and vaguely disquieting but not in a way where it feels like its secretly threatening...all the colors are right there to be appreciated, its just strange to walk thru such expressionist worlds. an incredibly worthy successor to rareware platformers, which in retro terms were the kings of this kind of context-heavy approach (and in a slightly different way, story-driven adventure games like psychonauts). many of these indie 3d platformers take from the rareware lineage, corn kidz 64 also gave me a lot of banjo vibes, but all the games turn out so different! wonderful stuff, and extremely comforting game...v little high stakes platforming, just vibes and exploration and cool puzzles. also even tho this was a fairly easy 100%, its one of my favorites ive probably ever done...half of it gives u one of the coolest rewards EVER, the other half contains one of the coolest puzzles in the game...which ended up being the final card i needed, so it rly went out on a high note. and ofc, the whole game Expertly makes u feel like a Little Guy

an absolute Plague upon my brain since i first started playing, and ive written so much thru various livemessages that trying to gather All my thoughts together into a semi-coherent piece of writing is intimidating. the most succinct summary i came up with before now is "i definitely would have loved this when i was 14, and im somehow genuinely kinda 50/50 on whether the fact that i didnt get the chance to Experience it back then is a blessing or not", so ig ill just start trying to unpack that and the various larger emotions it reduces to shorthand

so on one paw, considering that my first few hours in this game were filled with such absolute bewilderment as to how literally anyone even the wasteland of Gamers In 2010 took this seriously or praised it, i ended up Seeing The Vision several times by the end, and on the whole, even tho my bewilderment was justified, i do Get how the various tricks it pulls off earned it such a sizable initial reputation. even tho it's also Far too long, that does mean it gets into a rly good Spread of various pulpy paperback appeals that are not lost on me even as i care infinitely more about some then others...because for the most part, i do think it comes across that cage really likes All Of Them even as he leaves some undercooked. the world famous Norman Jaden and his Stupid Fucking Glasses are probably the biggest example...his plot utility is very little, interest in him as a human is Zilch past drug problems and being the relative "good cop", but his Stupid Fucking Glasses and emphasis on investigative process come across as sincere indulgences for cage..."indulgence" absolutely not meant as a criticism here, because whenever he's not being Wildly Misogynist And/Or Racist, cage is absolutely at his most endearing when he's attempting to show you something he thinks is really cool and will really impress you. he might not pull it off, but as much as i hate the Stupid Fucking Glasses im glad at least Someone was excited about them and how Neat they are. its easier for me to process in the show-off moments that are more directly in my wheelhouse...the killer's silly jigsaw games, especially the first three, were massive highlights for me, with the third in particular giving this brief glimpse into The Saw Game I Always Wanted. overenthusiastic film student flourishes like the various split-screen sections or that shot of jason's balloon flying off into the sky grew more and more likable the more i sat with them. it often has an amateurish energy that can be Unsettling given the clearly huge amount of money gone into this! but even tho the most fun you can have with heavy rain is probably just imagining a better version of its occasionally provocative concepts, theres a mind-consuming charm that kept it compelling thru the driest and most uneventful chapters. it ticks many many boxes of my personal proclivities...melodrama, high concept thriller shit, death games, big pulpy plot twists, formal experimentation, goddamn Water Symbolism...theres a lot im an easy sell for, and sometimes it lined up in my head just right

on the other paw! this is a 2000 page first draft, a "cinematic" experience with next to no faith in its imagery beyond blunt metaphor and uncanny hollywood pastiche (so many scenes and beats are constructed entirely out of two or three or four Big Movie Shorthands for Sadness), messily married to a genuinely garish use of the video game medium that intersperses every weighty dramatic moment with comical klutziness. cage seems to care about video games entirely in that they allow him to explore his fixation on Narrative Choice , which mostly ends up allowing him to deny the responsibility of having to make his Big Ideas and potential thematic threads Go Anywhere...if ethan is meant to have a coherent arc about realizing that nothing was his fault, it has to take for granted that he's Still Alive and Waggles The Stick Fast Enough to get his catharsis,,,and as the most dramatically coherent character in the game, u can imagine how the others make out. every madision chapter somehow managed to shock me with new flavors of Badly Written Woman, scott gets a really fun flashy twist that nevertheless feels deeply unreconciled on a human level, and norman is a prop to hang his Stupid Fucking Glasses and Prestige Cop Show Antics on. its so hard to meaningfully build to anything, or give impactful takeaways...i cant rly emphasize enough how much looking into the other endings lowered my opinion of the game, even considering the super mega happy ending i got wasnt entirely coherent or satisfying. instead the only coherency to be found is in the overall creative lens of the game, which is deeply emotionally unimaginative, self-obsessed, and insecure...cage's sad dad neurosis ceasing to be even theoretically sympathetic the moment he wields it against his Bitch Wife and his Inexplicably Devoted Trophy Gf. even putting aside the Larger Oopsies that happened at quantic dream, there is just such a scummy underbelly to this thing...big Provocative Questions:tm: explored in entirely self-justifying ways, an anti-arc where u realize u did nothing wrong and were actually an awesome epic dad the whole time. for all its occasionally endearing, mindlessly compelling qualities, it feels like i have at least a moderately moral duty to be mean to this

obviously u can take me with a grain of salt if u know my tastes,,, but for however badly vivec is laid out, or however weird it is that a bunch of white guys from maryland keep trying to do meaningful commentary on imperialism but their main nuance is to make the occupied peoples Xenophobic and Supremacist, or however overly small and unmotivated the soundtrack is, this rly does come closer then just about anything else to fulfilling the Promise of the computer rpg world. definitely not necessarily the computer rpg, its not really reactive enough for that...but when i first found out about skyrim as a Young Child, the promise that was made that intoxicated me was that i was going to enter an entire world, believable and living, which was my playground but that existed apart from me. currently i do think the Open World is probably best served by less traditional games...eastshade, lil gator game, even death stranding use their spaces for more Big Expressive Ideas then simply to emulate some kind of Reality thru compromised shorthand. but morrowind nails on the goldest possible version of itself...a small island, culturally and politically dense and self-sufficient but still involved in larger conflicts, extremely diverse in terms of aesthetics but all feeling coherent anyway. u see where they get their food, where those who want to get away from everyone else live, where the centers of local and occupational government are, the slow errosion of any imperial structures the further away you are from seyda neen. and the granular growth of the RPG Journey is equally intoxicating...the emphasis on pure Numbers rather then real-time skill is a roadblock to some, but its the main thing that sells your progression...the way it fundamentally feels to do things is appreciably different at the start and end of the game. the faction quests in particular were a huge highlight for me, very simple moment to moment, but their cumulative effect is way more impactful then anything i can recall from skyrim.

when open world games let me keep playing past the completion of the main quest, my main way to achieve closure before the uninstall is to simply walk all the way back to the starting area, preferably to the place i first took control. i aim to do this without any fast travel or consulting the map if possible. in some games this is more feasible then others, but morrowind is perfect for it. in doing so i passed thru some of the first roads i ever walked thru, the first big city i found, the first imperial outpost i found, the first ancestral tomb i raided before giving up on tomb raiding and becoming religious out of penance, the little town where i met the first memorably weird npc who gave me a quest, and finally the place where i killed my first mudcrab. it was, genuinely, a greatly emotionally pregnant experience. the main quest is great honestly, and i love how it ends framing itself as basically a superhero origin story for your character. but more then anything, it felt like My adventure. my aforementioned religious penance, the time i spent adventuring in the bitter coast and west gash before ever going to balmora, the way i slowly clawed my way up to the top of house redornan (which started full of hostile ashlanders and ended with me having a mansion and every guard fawning over me), the way i stumbled into a levitation artifact about halfway through my playthrough that i used up till the end of the game, the way being the nerevarine caused a crisis of faith which had me embracing my new self but still holding onto my temple beliefs stubbornly, and the way that the ordinators that were supposed to be killing me for being a heretic ended up mostly killing me for stealing their sacred armor. i dont think any other of this Kind of rpg has given me these kinds of memories, not even my beloved new vegas. wealth beyond measure indeed.

very difficult to put a number on this experience so i wont bother. must open by saying that for the most part i am very very displeased with the changes made in scholar...the updated visuals unlock a lot of the game's majesty which could be harder to appreciate in the often extremely flat light and color of the vanilla version, and Very Occasionally an area will actually feel less sloppy and more focused (like drangleic castle). for the most part though i have to agree that 40 dollars for an aimless and annoying romhack is absurd. shrine of amana and iron keep are especially fucking criminal because theres no new experience on offer, just a more time consuming and annoying variation on the experience that was already there. almost nothing gets as infuriatingly pointless as the changes made to heide's tower (which, being early, created an immediate bad taste in my mouth) but persistent aspects like the abundance of fragrant branch statues never let me forget "oh yeah, ive never had this bad of a time playing vanilla"

but despite all this, counter-intuitively, this playthru rly made me appreciate just how good dark souls 2 is. this is my fourth or maybe third and a half playthru, and every single time ive felt the larger narratives about it melt a little more in my head. many of its supposed flaws stay purely in the realm of the theoretical for me, and dont actually do anything to bring down my experience or make me not have fun. i know how to play around adp, ive learned how to do (and enjoy!!!) crowd control and approach relatively slow-paced multi enemy fights, i know to set the windmill on fire, and its especially difficult to care about Abstract "flaws" like "the balance of the healing system" when on an actual experiential level, lifegems make this one of the most approachable and welcoming souls games for a casual replay.

rly the game just rewards replay and intimacy at every turn...i once dismissed the level design, but i think that had more to do with the fact that dark souls 1 required intimacy with its levels from the getgo (with all the interconnectness and backtracking), so just blazing thru each level on Mostly first try didnt give them any time to leave a similar impression. going back to them repeatedly, i see levels that are not only often enjoyable in their tightness and spatial deliberate, but i see flashes of demons souls-esque creativity that stir my imagination. i love the machinery in iron keep and how you can control some of it, i love aldia's keep with its Dont Touch The Exhibits Or There Will Be Permanent Consequences, i love huntsman's copse with its ambushes that make u feel like prey, and more then anything i love brightstone cove tseldora's vision of an actual inhabited place...cozy homes built in harmony with the earth, filled with sand and decay and the scars of cruel mine labor and military/religious enforcement. probably one of my top 5 or 4 favorite fromsoft locations ever.

this may, to me, be the most low-level pleasurable souls game of them all, its weirdly forgiving mechanics (lifegems, tombstone revivals, centralized hub for merchants, level respecing, warping available from the start) combine with unique never-reused quirks that are enjoyable to play around simply due to their novelty (this is tbh my preferred vision of weapon durability) which combine with an extremely varied and aesthetically pleasing world. it is, necessarily, less gravitatous in my mind then dark souls 1 or demons souls, which i always feel the need to take my time to savor. but i think ds2's unique appeal for those on its wavelength rly has something to do with how strangely nice and approachable it is, providing all the expected beats of a fromsoft game in a way u can just blitz through with no speedbumps

and even this Frivolity feels meaningful and expressive within the boundaries of the game's story...monarchs struggle for their names and kingdoms to be remembered as theyre paved over by someone else with an equally meaningless title. vaguely familiar echos in unrecognizable late stages of iteration. dark souls 2 often plays like a high-concept horror story of a world without history...nothing but an eternal present that cannot learn from past mistakes nor imagine anything beyond itself. the ultimate uselessness of the player's autonomy here is a great trick that feels, in a way, far more meaningful and biting then any other dark souls game. i enjoy dark souls 3, but theres no question that its far more self-important and loudly insistent about its take on similar themes...strangely insecure as it puppets recognizable images in a way that takes them out of being sad and scary and into the realm of popcorn fanservice. there is a quiet and deadly confidence to dark souls 2 keeping its echos of the past as only vaguely recognizable, its past as decayed and rotting and not like anything you would think to cheer for. there is no comforting familiarity, just sickly emptiness. despite all its troubled development, it is a wholly unified, cohesive, and enduringly unique piece of work that frankly doesnt require any big brained revisionism or galaxy level counterintuitive approach to appreciate. time has been kind to it, and it will only get kinder. kind of a poetic inversion!

six year old azzy's favorite game ever. george feels far more like a Toy in my hands then any other 3d platformer character ive ever controlled...floaty, forgiving, and endlessly soft to the touch. the cast of Magical Orphans ticks every box from wish fulfilling freedom and community to overwhelm and spite and melancholy. even the finnicky vehicles feel fun and toylike. feels like a game u rent for the ps2 and have great memories with and no one else has heard of, and given how unfairly obscure this still is ig its not too far off from the truth. a place to go to be happy. and ofc the whole impetus behind the game is heartmeltingly sweet...hope that any kids who play it enjoy it as much as the little in my head did

bought and installed within the first minute of availability, which idk i will ever do for a game again, so feel free to take my autism with a grain of salt. but this is an exceedingly, endlessly lovable piece of art, one which reaffirms just about everything ive grown to believe about art in the first place. the source material , once uncomplicatedly loathed, has been slowly chipped away at by years of collective intimacy...sentences heard as groups of syllables, individual frames of animation immortalized, control quirks forced to be grappled with, npc requests and locations forced to be stored away in memory. this is to say nothing of the dedication it took to create an entire fan remaster, which leads directly into arzette via its lead developer. the result is a combination of nostalgic warmth, a grasp of what is compelling and memorable and striking about those games, and a melancholy stare at the parts that could have been better...a melancholy that could only be sated Through creation.

arzette will be described by many people as "the cdi zeldas but good." having enjoyed the remasters of those games, its more the final step in a process of escalation towards "the cdi zeldas, but there is less in the way of the good." the ultra-memorable quirk and expressiveness of the animation and voice acting are more widely acknowledged as boons now, but arzette also runs with the gorgeous background art, the lush and memorable music, and the miniature zelda experience via an interlocking spread of bite sized metroidvania maps. since its no longer on the cdi, individual screens are much meatier, which does make it slightly longer to recheck places (and rechecking places is what youre doing a Lot in all of these games, but especially this one with its more complex item progression), but it also allows for much more deliberate and satisfying level and encounter design. tricks from the cdi games have their most unpleasant edges sanded off, yet still retain their character. its by any measure an improvement on its inspirations, yet it never once feels judgemental or callous...instead it feels freed and joyus, the result of passion and time and effort and improved technology, chipping away at a dream created almost accidentally by people working with a bad console under tight time pressure.

and more then anything, even with some fun and dry meta jokes, i may not play a game more full of shamelessly earnest love this year. its close proximity with its source material allows it to share a bunch of discoveries its made that its so bubblingly excited about...yet its also an individual and distinctive piece of art carrying with it all the best sensibilities of contemporary metamodern media engagement, a plea to look closely at things that are dismissed and create beauty out of them. its most singular advancements are not its polishing up of rough gameplay ideas, but are in its disarmingly heartfelt and kind story and general tone. i know many people are cynical about pastiche, esp in a world where the same ideas are endlessly recycled over and over...but art should be about the free exchange of ideas, putting them out in the world for other people to respond to, feel about, and create on top of. it certainly cant be dismissed out of hand if it produces results like this even occasionally. hot moose man.

more inviting and less aggressive then faces of evil, which can feel slightly less satisfying to overcome, but i enjoy the world even more. theres a lush and natural quality to gamelon that nicely contrasts the harsh cliffs and towers of korodi. some rly rly choice color palates here, any stage that involves purple is a big favorite. the three main consumable items get a lot more use then faces of evil, which makes me wonder if this game got more time to cook and develop its mechanics compared to its sister. even zelda is a more immediately likable protagonist on the whole! i dont think its hugely better then faces of evil, but the slight differences are generally more to my tastes. cant imagine i wont have a great time with arzette, which im now locked into day one for!