Rewriting this to explain my potentially unpopular opinion more rather than "haha funny meme".

Of course, this game is a classic in many people's eyes, and I suppose I can see why. The colorful and cute visuals, that damn catchy theme song, and the simple yet deep co-op (this is important in a bit) play make it a mainstay in terms of retro games. So with all that in mind, along with it being one of Taito's biggest IPs, what does this Taito fan think of it? Surprisingly, I am not very fond of it, mostly over questionable game design choices.

Of course, the gameplay needs no explaining. Bubble 'em up, burst the bubbles, get the items and fruit. The more bubbles you burst at once, the more points you get, etc. The game gets it right there. But the game sadly doesn't really get the rest right that much, at least in terms of being a game you can sit down and beat.

Despite me playing this almost religiously as a kid, the holes in this regard become more apparent over time. While it's alright as a nice score attack game, you can kiss any chance of beating this game seriously goodbye if you're playing solo, and that's pretty bad for people like me who have played this game a ton. Not only is there that infamous bad ending, a lot of the game I feel is too reliant on co-op play, and while it's not impossible to beat it solo, it makes the game a ton harder, especially with the rather infuriating level designs towards the end. Not only that, but you can only continue if there's another player with you, which is kind of a dick move. Of course, one could cheat by spawning Bob right as you defeat Super Drunk, but it's only sidestepping the rest of the design flaws. This is the reason I say the GBA port of the game is the best way to play it, because it allows you to save your progress, lets you continue, AND it at least lets you get the good ending with only one player.

And there's that damn song. It's a classic video game song indeed, but it's the only song you're gonna hear most of the time in the game, with almost no other songs besides it. And it gets annoying real quick, which is pretty detrimental considering the game's length. Like I said before, probably doesn't matter much if you're playing it for score, but if you're someone who wants to beat it, like me, it's gonna hurt.

So to end it off, you have a game that's fantastic for co-op play and score attacks, but as a game to beat, at least on your own? Not very great. It's why I prefer playing the sequel, Bubble Symphony, or even it's cousins The Fairyland Story or Don Doko Don when I need that Taito single-screen platformer fix. They're more optimized for single player action and don't actively go out of their way to fuck over solo players.

I can't deny your importance to platformers and multiplayer action, Bubble Bobble, but I can see that you're very flawed, even if other people might not agree with me.

I wish that I could tell you that Zork is anywhere near the gigantic leap in the history of computer games that much of the world seems to think it is, but I've played Colossal Cave, or Adventure, or Colossal Cave Adventure, or The-Game-That-Did-Most-Of-This-Immediately-Before-Zork. That said, I should admit that prior to now, I'd been selling Zork short. It definitely IS meaningfully different from its predecessor and stands in its own right as one of gaming's critical progenitors.

Zork, unlike Colossal Cave, is not limited to a two or three word text parser and doesn't reduce most item-based verbs down to the word "use." You can even ask it questions, such as "What is a grue?" This is, in my somewhat controversial opinion, both positive and negative. Colossal Cave's limitations force a certain simplicity onto the player's interactions with the world. The player can intuit pretty quickly what sorts of things they can do, and how those commands must be formatted. Zork introduces more complexity, which in my previously more pessimistic read translated to more confusion and a greater tendency toward misinterpretation. The English language is a hot, filthy mess, and given the choice between an ultra-primitive computer program attempting to wrangle that mess in all its complexity like Zork does, and a slightly more primitive program constructing its own clearer, more simplistic language, I, as a 21st century player, am actually inclined to choose the latter.

Having finished Zork 1, I mostly stand by this preference, but I have found the appeal in Zork's more advanced parsing. While it may be more frustrating or overwhelming at times, there's something to be said for the mystery provided by that wider possibility space. The options on any given "screen" of Zork are less apparent, and that can lead to greater creativity on the part of the player. It's exciting to come up with a course of action that would be outside the capabilities of Colossal Cave and see it play out. It's also all the more likely that you'll encounter some generic error text, because the more flexibility you introduce here, the more ridiculous edge cases you burden the author with responding to. If an input produces nothing, it provokes disappointment. If the author tries to respond to every single potential input, it exhausts sanity. In other regards, however, it's an important quality of life improvement. In Zork you don't have to type "get sack" and THEN "get bottle", you can type a single line: "get sack and bottle." More importantly, upon closer inspection I've found that Zork 1 never ACTUALLY demands much complexity of the player at all... it's more just the threat of it that had me digging in my heels. Zork's difficulty has much more to do with its sense of humor and its classic moon logic than anything else, though a more limited option set certainly does help one feel their way out of such things more easily. Colossal Cave has a giant snake that must somehow be defeated by a tiny bird, but with so few verbs and such a limited inventory at that point in the game, trial and error WILL eventually save the day.

In many ways, Zork, or at least Zork 1, still definitely feels to me like a clone of a more inspired game. At the same time, having spent more hours with it, I do think that there is value in Zork's audacious tampering. It develops its tools in an interesting direction, layers on some more interesting prose, and creates something more playful than its inspiration. Zork's parser is genuinely impressive from an early programming perspective, breaking down sentences in an effective and intuitive way. Besides, it's hard to take Zork too harshly to task for basically flat-out plagiarizing Colossal Cave when that still requires replacing all of the puzzles it's made of. I feel it's also worth noting that in 1977, Zork was already more than Zork 1. The original mainframe version of the game basically contained all of Zork 1 AND almost all of Zork 2 before it was organized into a trilogy of smaller games for sale. That Zork 2 content helps a LOT in the originality department, and with this impressive quantity of puzzling setpieces, I find it hard not to toss Zork a few more mental points... especially considering there was so little else going on in the nascent world of gaming in 1977. The fact of the matter is, Zork is still a more enjoyable experience than any other piece of software produced in its year, with unique strengths that hold up fairly well even to this day.

The gameplay is great, the characters are great like in Remake part 1, but the game completely falls apart at the back half when the story becomes even more of a mess than part 1. The game once again has a bloated, far too long final dungeon and a complete mess of a reinterpretation of the events at the Forgotten Capital. Even the final boss of the game is too long.
I will never not be irritated at this "remake" series being a bloated and bad sequel to the original game. Seriously, play the original FFVII. Oh well.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth was an absolute roller coaster of an experience for me. There were moments the game had me clapping and cheering over what was occurring on-screen, and others that had me scratching my head, wondering why anyone would leave this in the final production.

It's tough for me to explain this dissonance thoroughly, but in short, I think my biggest complaint is the game feels incredibly bloated - both from the amount of optional side content it throws in your face, and from actual main beats in the main path. Even when attempting to mainline the story, you are thrown through constant diversions and an almost grueling level of over-indulgence of the original source material.

However, the presentation, characters and their minute to minute interactions are some of my favorite in video games. There is little more enjoyable than traveling around with a group of pals as they tackle an adventure to save the planet. Cloud, Tifa, Aerith and the gang live in my head rent free on a minute to minute basis - if anything, this will be a franchise I continue to revisit just to ensure I can check in with my best friends again. The combat continues to be best in class, although I will say some of the additions were a bit nuanced and were hardly ever utilized.

To summarize, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth feels like a game tailored and aimed at its hardcore fanbase of its original release in the 1990s - if you just can't get enough of your favorite game and characters of all time, this decadent open world adventure will tickle your fancy immensely, but for those of us on the outside, trying to understand and appreciate the love this entry has, there are a staggering amount of roadblocks that are keeping me at bay from falling head over heels for this boisterous remake trilogy.

i wanna give it a 5 because the front half was so fucking good, but i also wanna give it a 1 because the back half was so mindbogglingly bad.

i found it very odd that the game's writing dropped off when the main plot started coming to the fore. legitimately, everything up to that point was golden. toe to tip, the writing was way beyond what AAA RPGs have been shitting out for the last eternity. so why, then, did none of it last through the unraveling of its own story?

as soon as the game starts pushing you more heavily into the main plot, all the intricate character writing seems to fly out the window and the whole party devolves from characters into plot devices. if you asked me what was going on in the last 10 hours of that game, or why any of it even happened, i genuinely could not tell you. i wish i could. it was epilepsy-inducing light shows happening back-to-back in a bloated, wet fart of a boss rush for 3-4 hours only to then turn around and smirk at you like, "wasn't that shit awesome?"

i wanted to love this game very much. the open world stuff was common fare but couched in enough nostalgia and clever/funny bits of writing that i had full intentions to complete all the side content. i could not, in good faith, recommend this game to anyone unless they get it for free or at super discount.

2.5/5. i am absolutely fucking begging people to stop letting tetsuya nomura and kazushige nojima write stories.

I really shouldn’t get Doom II

I really should be bothered, stressed, and highly frustrated by it.

It has some levels that should drive to pure rage, stuff that in any other context I should theoretically complain about.

And yet

I get it

I’ve spoken many times of the importance of Doom both as a space for community and player expression and the pivotal impact it had on the PC scene, and it still feel like I’ve only said understatements. A game that holds up so amazingly well decades later, with some of the most fascinating and fun levels ever put together, and with three episodes that each try to tackle not only different visuals and themes, but also each focuses on a completely different gameplay idea. All this to say that, yeah, I really like the funny killing demon game.

I think suffices to say that Doom II had some mad big shoes to fill, both now for new players like me and especially back then, and I gotta be completely serious here and say: I really didn’t think it could ever do it. Doom was and, in a way, still is an incredibly unique way so tightly designed, so puzzle-like like on its maze-like lay-outs, so calculated with how it decides when to throw curve-balls at you and pull-off novel enemy positioning; Episode 3,Inferno, felt like the final frontier in that regard, the ultimate exploration of the whack-ass and unexpected ideas you could pull off with Doom’s base, at least back then. And if ‘95’s E4 introduced in The Ultimate Doom is anything to go by, perhaps it’s a better idea to leave things as they are to not repeat a formula until it gets stale or expand it to extremes where it just breaks apart.

Thing is, Doom II didn’t even came out in 95, hell, it didn’t release after Ultimate Doom. 1994, more specifically September of 1994, not even a full year after the original’s release, so little time that with the tools at their disposal and without as much as a Q&A department, the team had to test the maps manually, something which they didn’t even could really do properly; so little time that basically the entirety of the original’s base was reused, which led to some funky stuff like only one new weapon being added and one of the newly introduced enemies clearly being a recolored Hell Baron; so little time that the mere idea of wanting to make even more maps that those of the previous release should have spelled absolute disaster. Because, how in the living fuck do you pull it together? How could you expect to produce something that doesn’t feel more that a cobbled together expansion with such a time constraint? How do you make more Doom?

Doom II’s answer to that question is straightforward: you don’t

This not to say the game doesn’t pick up from where it left off, both in that it continues just after the rather disturbing ending of the original, and that everything you can do is lifted straight up from that original adventure; the game’s gonna look at you funny if you play this as your first rodeo, ‘cause it’s not gonna pull any punches, but if you did play the original, the buckle up my friend, hell is loose and it has brought a surprise or two with it.

Things already feel different from the very start, even in the small room of Entryway and the cramped passage-ways of Underhalls, something clearly has changed; you face the same enemies, your arsenal is formed by the same arms you got to meet in your first go around, and yet, the design feels tighter, everything feels faster; you dart around enemies, evading zombies and demons at every turn, they surprise you in unexpected ways, it demands speed of you. The original Doom was never a slower game by any stretch of the imagination, but it was more patience focused, more strategy based, and many of the situations that it created revolved around waiting and taking you’re your best shot or calmly thinking where to go after grabbing a key. In Hell of Earth I can count with the fingers of only one of my hands the moments I let go of the run button, and I say this as the highest form of compliment possible.

And it only keeps going: the super shotgun finally gets introduced, a weapon so good that the only complain I have with it is that it kind of makes the original shotgun obsolete; a fantastic closed range powerhouse that it feels like the developers where whispering ‘’now you gotta go IN’’ as they hand it to you; you also get your arsenal at a much steady and faster pace that in Doom, which is surprising considering that this time the Episode format is completely ditched: the levels go after one another, and unless you die or decide to reset, pistol-starting is now an option rather an obligation, and even then, if you do decide to do it, you can potentially regain most of your weapons even before being half-way done with a level; I myself accidentally pistol-started at Barrels of fun and I’ve never been so glad about a miss click in my life, it was so incredibly fun and exciting and tense even more that it would have been otherwise. Doom II also feels far less stingy with its ammo, in the past you may have switch an arm into another because you just couldn’t use it anymore, now it’s more a matter of ‘’ok, how do I deal with this bunch of fuckers?’’; battles start through ambushes, traps or encounters, and you need to quickly analyze the situation if you want to get through alive in less than a second… and that’s more than enough. Doom II may be cheecky with its enemy placement, but its never unfair, it always gives you enough time to either take cover or to think about what’s the better tool for a certain enemy or group: the rocket launcher may be the best option to geal with that group of Imps, but that Chain-gunner can eat through health in a matter of seconds, why not use the super shot gun on him first and on tap him while you dart around the fire-balls? That’s only a taste of the type of situations of Doom II puts you through, combats that should feel stressful and frustrating, but instead feel exciting and in occasions made me feel an adrenaline like no other; I swear I audibly gasped when I say that amount of enemies at the Suburbs, and I smiled and celebrated as I emerged victorious after dealing with them in a way not even I thought I could.

Levels only get more creative and expansive as they go, The Crusher (aptly named after its main attraction) shows how the rest of the game will play around verticality to create more interesting battles and explorations, as well as introduce unconventional ideas that you might not have expected to see in the previous entry, and that changes your mindset in a way you may not notice at first, but that will certainly will make you be on the look-out. Things that once would have been secrets now are required to be found to progress, it asks of you to be creative, to think outside the box and do what you never would have even conceived of doing. In one of the levels I was trapped, not knowing what to do, but then I noticed a wall with a texture that was extremely different from the rest. I thought that ‘’There’s no fucking way’’. I shoot it. The path opens. Time at time again, places like The Citadelor The Spirit World expect you a level of attention and imagination that the game lends itself to receive, an imagination you have and use to beat even the most seemingly confusing puzzles and mazes; you’ll need to check the map, you’ll need to run, you’ll need to brave, it’s through that that game will reward you, maybe with a Megacharge, maybe with the BFG, maybe with a secret level, who knows! I certainly can’t say for sure ‘cause I feel like I’ve left a ton to even be discovered!

And yeah, I didn’t meant to not use the world ‘’paces’’, more than ever in any of the Doom Episodes, the Hell on Earth maps feel like real parts of a world: expansive and open world urban locations overrun by demons, cultist temples created to stop your advances, old bastions taken and repurposes by the legions of hell to fight against you; even the more ‘’gamey’’ of levels, like Tricks and Traps! or Gotcha!, are excusable because they so fun and even funny that I cannot be mad at them, and as for the rest, they really sell you the idea that you are traversing and meeting your objectives little by little; the narrative has as much presence as the original game, but it has a much greater impact ‘cause not only the stakes are even higher, it also feels like you are progressing through a real story, and that this is a true war against the enemies that face you, new and old.

The game also realized the full potential of its older cast, like how both the Cyberdemon and Spider-Mastermind act much better as level obstacles to evade than actual bosses, and the new faces that arrive are simply incredible; I’ve genuinely never loved and hated an enemy in a videogame equally as I do the Arch-vile, seeing him generated dread in my body, but also made me smile at the opportunity to face such an interesting and unique enemy. The Pain Elementals, Hell Knights an Revenants are all incredible new comer that pile up on the ‘’NEVER STOP MOVING FOR THE LOVE OF GOD’’ mentality, and they are all incredibly memorable, especially the Mancubi, I already loved them in the new games, but hearing them scream their own name as they shoot double projectiles was so fucking memorable. And that final boss.. GOD, finally a Doom boss that requires EVERYTHING you learnt; ammo management, dealing with individual threads, resource usage and even aim, such a fantastic send off that isn’t just a ‘’spam BFG to win fest’’, this is simply outstanding, so fun, so imperfect in the best way imaginable.

If Doom was already a passion project, then Doom II is that even more deranged, more reckless, more… itself. Sandy, Romero and the team knew they could do a true glory fest, and they went even beyond that. Doom II is so experimental, so unique, so unquestionably goofy that I can’t stop gushing about it. It’s more than a blast to beginning to end, it’s a challenge that wants to have as much as fun as you do playing it, and tries out new stuff at each turn, and even those times it doesn’t stick, it keeps being memorable in the best way imaginable.

It's OG Doom at its most savage, at its most free and wild, and its most fun and creative, and I for one have fallen in love with it, and now I can totally see why so many others did too, why so many others keep its memory and spirit alive through .wads and crazy ideas through this one moreso than any other. It’s a game in a way made for itself, but also for everyone that loves Doom, for everyone that loves shooters, for everyone that loves untamed creativeness.

What a fucking magnificent way to start the year, an experience that goes beyond the sum of its parts, and adventure that builds something that evolves and subverts what it once was, the opposite of Hell on Earth.

Rebuilding Earth ought to be a lot more fun than ruining it was

Recommended by @ZapRowsdower (Thank you so much!)

We are still trying to find the key of eternal happiness when the answer has been right in front of us since 1993: using the shotgun in DOOM and one tapping every Imp you come across.

Today is one hell of a day for me huh? Not only it's the day I've FINALLY finished DOOM after multiple attempts at getting into it, not only this is my 150th review, which just saying it's fucking coo-coo crazy to me, can't believe I've written so many reviews on here in just a bit less than a year, but today also happens to be my birthday! So, today is the day, the stars align and my time it's right, it's time for me to shook the entire world with what I'm about to say, my opinion on DOOM will forever change the course of videogame discourse, so buckle up motherfuckers, 'cause this is it; Deemon's verdict on DOOM is..............









Yeah game good.


DOOM is, in a ton of ways, THE PC game, it's not only THE grand-father of the so called ''boomer-shooters'', but it's alsoTHE FPS; we now have the meme spawned by both the press and some players about how ''everything is Dark Souls'', but during the 90's, if your game was in first person, it was bound to get universally compared to DOOM in some capacity. It revolutionized the industry in such a way it's effects are still palpable to this very day, and it spawned a series that time and time again has caused discourse around it. Many people still put hundreds of hours replaying this game or trying many of the community made maps or levels, also known as WADs. It's a game that finds way to modernize itself while never truly changing, sporting level and enemy design that some of its contemporaries and even modern outputs could only dream of.

And here I am, 30 years later, 30 goddam years after it released, to talk about a game almost 10 years older than me. Out of all the games I've written about, this is the one that it feels comical to try to say something new, to add a new perspective to the conversation, because what’s left for me to say? What value can I contribute to the overall conversation around the legend of DOOM? The honest answer, being totally realistic, is… probably none, and while that may be discouraging… but that won’t stop me from trying to sing its praises and faults with my own voice!

And singing its praises I will, and to be honest, I lied. Game isn’t good. Game is FANTASTIC. DOOM’s approach to design is not to introduce as many elements as it can, to make very level distinct by making it have completely new stuff, but instead it focuses on only a bunch of elements and makes the absolute most out of them. You can count all the enemies with the two hands, including bosses, and yet, at no point the repetition settled in. Traversing this seemingly endless mazes, the variety on how challenges and encounters are designed is staggering; no two shoot-outs really feel the shame, and the seeing the non-stop moment that made Eternal so much fun for me being already present in 1993 made feel a certain feeling of happiness I really can’t describe. Kiting around enemies, dodging projectiles or running backwards from Pinkies while pumping bullets onto them produces that feeling of adrenaline so unique to DOOM. It isn’t scared to mess with you; new small rooms filles with enemies will open up after grabbing an item or activating a switch will open up out of nowhere, or maybe enemies will surprise you behind corners, right after open doors or hidden within darker areas, and it not only it never feels cheap or unfair, but also keeps you on your toes and makes it so certain sequences can be kinda scary and creepy, and make you doubt even the most innocent of empty rooms. But the greatness of the enemy placement only means something because of how fantastic the level themselves are: the three chapters have their own flare to own another and overarching elements, the first one for example is the one that introduces all the elements that will be explored upon in the next maps and focuses around shorter, more easy to navigate mazes, while the third one, Inferno, explores the limits of DOOM’s level structure and experiments upon that, one of the maps being a small sandbox.

Even beyond this chapter to chapter distinctions, no two levels feel the same; they all present an unique new perspective within the same ‘’find the correct color key’’ structure; they all feel like real places while at the same time being artificial enough to offer fun and weird- ass moments, and when you factor all the secrets, hidden weapons, power ups and the such, it compels you to look to each and every nook and cranny that the levels have to offer, and who knows, you may end up finding the wonderful BFG or a secret exit that might send you to an extra map. It’s all feels purposeful, natural and… kind of ethereal, the music manages work both as a perfect battle companion and as incredibly atmospheric background, like the grunts and sounds of demons heard across the walls. Those moments of quiet creepiness, like walking around the corpse filled rooms or seeing demons surrounding monuments to a greater superior being, blend with the non-stop weapon changing action and the 90’s dumb ‘’coolness’’ so well it still surprises me; a game that at the end of each chapter presents you with a overly stupid and cheesy ending text and basically makes you lose all your progress but still manages to be so fantastic and have so many more serious moments within gameplay, it’s a game unlike any other.

DOOM shys away from perfection: bosses feel unbalanced, like they Cyberdemon pretty much one-shoting you even at ‘’Hurt me plenty’’ difficulty, and even anti-climactic, like the final boss; some secrets feel too hidden and I think the backtracking, while mostly done excellently, in the final levels is too much and some of the exists should have been a bit clearer, and yet, despite this few gripes, I only walk away from this experience feeling a great sense of joy; DOOM is amazing, dumb in all the right ways and masterfully designed, everyone involved felt for this nothing but a great passion and work, and that it’s made clear through each pixel of this hellish lands. Such confidence emanates from this game that in a lot of ways, it feels like they already wanted to make a DOOM 2 in the future, and I only applaud them for it. Here I am, 30 years later, and having enjoyed this game as if it came out yesterday; Doom is indeed eternal, and even if some may not enjoy it, I think everyone should be compelled to at least try it. This is one of those games which I think everyone will feel completely differently towards, love it for different reasons, hate it for different reasons; maybe everything that has to be said about has already been told, but shouldn’t stop anyone from writing their own piece, from talking about it as if it was 1993 again. The magic of some games should forever relished, talked about, hell, some more flawed games also deserve discourse around them, both positive and negative. Because when everything is truly said, then there’s not much room for enjoyment or surprises, and those are the only things I felt during my playtime in the lunar bases and hell. What a Big Fucking Great Time…

And also, if it just so happens that today it’s also your birthday or it is at the time you are reading this… then happy birthday, and stay safe!

Criticism of postmodernism is intellectually diverse, reflecting various critical attitudes toward postmodernity as it takes form in philosophy, art, literature and games. Postmodernism itself is generally defined by an attitude of skepticism, irony, or rejection toward what it describes as the grand narratives and ideologies associated with modernism, especially those associated with Enlightenment rationality - though postmodernists in the arts may have their own specific criteria and definitions of postmodernism that depend upon the medium.

Common targets of postmodern criticism include universalist ideas of objective reality, morality, truth, human nature, reason, science, language, economics and social progress; critics of postmodernism are often reactionary, defending such concepts against the counter-cultural critique of postmodern artwork.

It is frequently alleged that postmodern scholars are hostile to objective truth; they promote obscurantism, and encourage relativism in culture, morality and knowledge to an extent that is epistemically and ethically crippling: criticism of more artistic post-modern movements such as post-modern art, literature or video games may include objections to a departure from beauty, lack of coherence or comprehensibility, deviation from clear structure and the consistent use of dark and negative themes.

Post-postmodernism, cosmodernism, digimodernism, automodernism, altermodernism, and metamodernism rank among the more popular prospective terms for the movement against against postmodernism, though the lack of a unifying term demonstrates the difficult, uncertain nature of post-postmodern critical analysis.

In my review of Mario Party the other day, I suggested that the game was one of Nintendo's most postmodern works - what does that really mean? First, let's consider some possible features of postmodern gaming, both in terms of video games and board games:

• The game's designer and design become less relevant than the players' interpretation of the signified or signifier. We might see this more or less explicitly within a game like the award-winning card game Dixit: using a deck illustrated with dreamlike images, players select cards that match a title suggested by the "storyteller", and attempt to guess which card the "storyteller" selected. While the game has a scoring system, it's intentionally ambiguous, and open to the interpretation of the players and gamemaster; it's a game that can be played with a diverse group of players with little to no difficulty presented by challenge of skill - like Mario Party, Dixit frequently wrests interpretive authority from the games' designers and publishers and places it in the hands of arbitrary metrics that don't necessarily exist in a rulebook.

• A postmodern game's structure loses its center and gives way to free play. Generally speaking, this has never been a strong-suit of the video game medium - at least on the surface. This application is seen most clearly in the rise of pen-and-paper RPGs, almost all of which make a distinction directly in the beginning of their rule books: "This isn't a game like those other games with winners and losers; it's a game just for playing." In fact, RPGs thrive precisely on the différance present within the interpretive play among the players — and break down when munchkins or rules lawyers try to reinforce the structure. In short - the when the rules are made up and scores don't matter, players are forced to find other ways to enjoy themselves. The same is true of Mario Party.

• The game's structure is deconstructed by examining and reinforcing that which runs counter to the game's purported structure on the back of the box. This can be seen in games like Fluxx and Killer Bunnies. Here, the idea that planning and strategy will pay off, rewarding a player with victory is shown to be false because the idea hinges on the victor's proper management of chance, but chance is by definition that which is beyond management. So let's plan and strategize for an hour and then let chance tell us the winner she picks blindly in the end. Sound familiar?

• The game makes room for subaltern voices and questions the privileged nature of traditional binaries. Once Deep Blue won, there was no longer any substantive difference between a grandmaster and a geek with a GameFAQ. But can you ever truly defeat a machine that's controlling the dice and your opponents? Can you ever truly defeat someone who can win by doing nothing?

• The game breaks down barriers between itself and the things beyond it - for nothing is truly outside the game. This adage brings to mind old-school LARPing of the kind depicted in the movie Gotcha!, but could also include metaludic games like Quelf, where the game becomes about how a person plays the game or even does things away from the game while the game is ongoing.

Though the benchmarks and criteria for postmodernism are (perhaps intentionally) vague, I think it’s fair to say the original Mario Party exceeds in all the categories I’ve chosen to define above. It’s a game that interrogates the concept of the game - both board and video - by removing the mask of objective order, revealing that all accomplishments happen by divine will of the Nintendo 64.

Mario Party 2, however, fails to improve on the ideas of its predecessor in any meaningful way (apart from putting Donkey Kong in a wizard outfit). It’s a reactionary work of digimodernistic post-post modernism that seeks to correct the “mistakes” of Mario Party’s avant-garde by reintroducing the illusion of rules, structure, and “objective truth”: an essential RETVRN to the logic and empiricism that Gamers love so much. A tale as old as the medium itself, where art is the first thing to leave the party when your product needs to fit neatly on the subjective scales at IGN.

Horror Land, Mario Party 2’s “hardest” board, is a perfect case study of how the sequel’s introduction of mathematical “fairness” robs the game of an identity it was previously proud of. The first lap of the board is a 30-square circle with Toad, the star-giver, standing at the precise midsection. Players are given the option of diverging onto a different path, but there is no statistical incentive for doing so - players start with half the coins needed to buy a star, and it’s possible to accrue the remaining funds in a single turn. Apart from a Bank square (oh no! I lost FIVE coins!!) and Single-Player Minigame square, there are no other “inputs” to the system outside of the once-a-turn minigame: the game is all but ordering you to conform to a closed loop in order to take your first step towards an antipyrrhic victory that will be decided solely by the one who can inflate a Bowser Blimp the fastest. There are no alternatives; Wario’s subaltern voice is silenced; Yoshi’s questions about the privileged nature of traditional binaries are unanswered; Luigi’s interrogation of the apparent power structures falls on deaf ears. It’s time for Bumper Balloon Cars, and everyone’s getting some coins.

Contrast this with Mario’s Rainbow Castle, purportedly Mario Party 1’s easiest board - players can steal each others stars and coins at-will; there’s a button that foists Bowser’s roulette wheel upon foes; you can be sent back to the start for having the mere audacity to roll a 3 at the wrong time; Koopa Troopa is running a wealth-redistribution system at each corner of the board. And that’s all before we even get into the minigames, where stepping on a goomba in a party hat can instantly reduce your balance to absolute zero. It’s a revelry in capitalist chaos wearing the flesh of the Mario Brothers and it’s absolutely beautiful. Even Luigi’s “ohhHHHh nnOooOoo!” sounds more chunky and brittle, the bauds compressed under the sheer weight of environmental disorder. He’s saying something. Mario Party 2 isn’t.

While SaGa 2 (necessarily) loses some of what makes the original such a wildly electric piece of gaming--the punk meta plays on a nascent genre's conventions, the puzzle-like joy of having to relearn how an RPG works at the most basic level, the absurdist story beats that no publisher in their right mind would ever allow--it gains an equal amount in return.

For starters, if someone were to look at the game at literally its most surface level, they'd be forgiven for thinking this sequel was a genuine generational leap and not a sequel that released within a year on the same hardware. Suddenly sprites are expressive and varied, detail and shadow give environment dimensionality, and the battle UI is reworked into something wonderfully clear and elegant.

Mechanically it does much the same, expanding on the first's to create something fuller, more rounded. This move towards polish may or may not be to your taste (in many ways I like the sharp and jagged nature of the first more) but it is hard to argue much with the results. With an extra class type, the robot, the player sees a real jump in expression and experimentation. Where once the puzzle was understanding systems, now it is solving how to beat and rebeat the game with its dozen or so possible team compositions.

And while I will always prefer the world and the moments of Saga 1, that is not to imply this isn't also incredibly strong on that front, too. Kawazu is very quietly one of RPGs greatest writers, after all; there are few in the entire medium as capable at concise, evocative storytelling. He can pack an entire world into a sentence, give birth to daydreams on daydreams with little more than a single NPC and a single line. The world populated by giants who made themselves small and live in secret among "normal" sized folk in particular had me hooting and hollering at its absolute imagination.

The real magic is that it isn't just imagination--it's a pretty thematically complex, satisfying work as well. SaGa 2 is a game deeply concerned with authority and power. Whispers of the supreme come up again and again and every time are proven to be lies, fictions. The player character's dad, idolized since childhood, is an absentee reckless fool who, though supposedly on the right side, is wrapped up with everyone else in a meaningless play for power and control that is little more than a fairy tale. What SaGa 2 asks is: does that matter? Does it matter that these were invented, were imagined? Does it matter that it is all quite literally (as revealed) a game; nothing but programming? We believe in them. And when enough believe, they become real.

So yeah, the the original is held closer and dearer to my heart because I am a broken freak of a human. But the sequel is a massive success in its own right, a bold declaration that the first was not an accident or an anomaly, but the beginning of one of the greatest video game series we've ever been blessed with.

more thoughts here: https://www.tsundokudiving.com/p/talking-games-saga-2the-final-fantasy