Dark Souls III is all killer, all filler, and I'm dead and stuffed.

Regardless of one's opinion on this or any of the other more recent From Software games, I think it somewhat uncontroversial to say that the somewhat polarized reception of its sequels and successors only serve to highlight the strength of the original Dark Souls. Despite whatever imperfections it may have had, Dark Souls was a game that did so many things right that a lot of people found wildly different reasons to love it. Dark Souls is in so many facets so close to the absolute essential core of what makes video games great that even if another game could get even closer in even one aspect, it would always come at the cost of something else.

Dark Souls III's core gameplay is most similar to the original Dark Souls, but with its animations and character control fine-tuned to perfection; this is the first From Software game where it feels good to simply move around. The game has all of the quality of life improvements that began as band-aid fixes in Dark Souls II. Every level in the game is as detailed, sprawling, and multi-layered as one of Bloodborne's best, yet their arrangement within the world as a whole is as transparent as in the first game. Speaking on gameplay specifically, calling Dark Souls III a "greatest hits" of the series is still selling it short. It's not just borrowing the most memorable situations and set-pieces from previous games, it's picking and choosing elements of the games' systems and structures themselves, and still building upon them yet.

One of my favorite moments in Dark Souls was on my second playthrough, reaching the tower before the Taurus Demon boss fight, and realizing just how much of the world I could see. Picking out landmarks and realizing how (despite being rendered in much lower detail than it would be up close) decidedly congruous the world was, and more importantly how intentional it all felt. The popular phrase when showing a game's scale is to point at something in the distance and say "you can go there", but "there" is often not a place of any import, and the "go"-ing process is rarely anything all that special. One of Dark Souls III's earliest moments is the game giving the player a similar view of virtually every above-ground area of the game, with only a couple of places barely obscured (though one should not assume that the game has nothing to hide, as it in fact has some of the most obtuse secrets in the series). At virtually any point in the game the player can look around, see where they've been, where their goal lies, and think of all the challenges they overcame to get to where they are. While Dark Souls may have had a more interconnected world and the potential for more diverse routes, I genuinely believe that Dark Souls III surpasses it in both level design and in its believability as a space.

While the player's quest is ultimately to defeat all of the Lords of Cinder and link the first flame once more, the bulk of the journey through the aforementioned spaces is spent hunting down one in particular: Aldrich. A web of interconnected side-quests eventually narrows into this encounter, chasing him from the Cathedral of the Deep to Irithyll of the Boreal Valley. A trek that lasts the better part of the entire game ends in Anor Londo, perhaps the most hallowed location from the original game, its cathedral now stripped from its original context, a sort of museum artifact for some invading heretic. The player finds within an avatar of pure consumption, puppeting around one of surprisingly few named returning fan-favorite characters. The message could not be more clear, the anti-climax could perhaps only barely be more intentional, this is an absolutely naked indictment. Dark Souls has to end, because if it continues it will turn to sludge and cannibalize everything you love about it.

The heart of Dark Souls III's narrative is, like Dark Souls II before it, ultimately about the futility of this whole sequel project. Dark Souls II did do the roar, but it also smashed the cake, all the while yelling "Ya like that!? Huh?!"

As Dark Souls III plays its hand it feels more like the game has sat you down to sternly say "listen, we know you like this, and we'll give it to you one more time, but this is it." I personally think that video games' status as commercial entertainment products has been pretty much a disaster for their ability to tell stories, and a side effect of this is that some of the most potent stories they can tell are often bittersweet metanarrative musings on this predicament. Dark Souls III may not be the absolute strongest example of this, but you absolutely could do so, so much worse, and its real triumph is in delivering a compelling version of this story in balance with just being a plain fantastic gameplay experience.

The DLC only makes it more clear, with its principle locations being another world, plagued with rot and its denizens begging for death, and the entire Dark Souls universe compacted like trash. Dark Souls III's world, the "converging lands", was already a kind of new Pangaea, the different continents of the Lords of Cinder merging together into a tangled mess of ravines and canyons. By the end of the Ringed City DLC, everything has compressed together to the point where all that's left is an endless desert of ash. The final goal of these DLC areas, the finale of the entire series, is to help a certain NPC paint a new world. What is this world? It doesn't matter. Giving some clear-cut explanation, like "It's Bloodborne! Or Demon's Souls!" would completely undermine the entire conclusion.

The only thing that matters is that it's new, that it's something else.

One NPC in the Ashes of Ariandel DLC says, specifically, that the player must "make the tales true, and burn this world away."

This is the real curse of a zombie franchise, the lack of any real finality will always give every element of its story a kind of impermanence. Without an absolute true ending, anything in the narrative is up for debate, can be rewritten and ret-conned to suit a new installment. Dark Souls II was itself an admission that its own existence meant that there could be no true tale of the original game, and while it initially tries not to let the cat out of the bag, Dark Souls III's grand anti-climax also invalidates a particular player decision in the original game by canonizing only one particular option.

Dark Souls had to end, absolutely end, so that it could be anything at all.

Hi-Fi Rush don't mean a thing.

In the absolute broadest sense, I want more games like Hi-Fi Rush. I want more original IP, I want more studios to make games that seem outside of their wheelhouse, I want games to tackle new ideas and genre fusion can be a good place to synthesize something unique. I want more small-scale games that aren't structured with the goal of being the only thing I spend my free time on for the next year. I want more games that run at high framerates and resolution even if that means cutting back on the highest gloss new visual technique.

But if I look just a little closer at any part of this thing I just don't get it. As an action game it feels sluggish, stiff. As a rhythm game, I mean, come on; you get 8 licensed songs and they're all corny bullshit from over a decade ago, not new enough to be fresh, not old enough to be revered. Half the songs are from 90's acts who had certifiably entered a "washed up" or "sellout" phase by that point, and mixed in you get things like a Wolfgang Gartner novelty Mozart remix. People praised the original soundtrack (i.e. "streamer mode") when the game came out, saying that playing without the licensed tracks was no real loss, and I just really don't know how anyone listening to either score could interpret this as anything but an insult to both.

The game is full of platforming segments, but between the player's complete lack of momentum and how completely ineffectual both jumping and airdashing are, every single obstacle is a clunky chore. During combat the game practically plays itself; in fact, the idea that you don't really need rhythm to play this rhythm game was a selling point (although "selling point" may be a poor choice of words since everyone's playing this on GamePass). The entire experience feels like a checklist, there's just not a single moment of joy in playing this. There isn't even much extrinsic motivation because it always seems that even if I keep my style meter at S for an entire battle I end up getting a B. The only difficulty curve this game has starts at "win sloppily" and goes up to "win skillfully" but when the ranking gives you such an unclear idea of how well you're actually doing, why should I care?

This game has the misfortune of being the next high-profile action game after Bayonetta 3, and looking and feeling a whole lot like a worse Transformers: Devastation, and that's Platinum at their absolute most milquetoast. Its style could be best described as "inoffensive", the main character is just a regular guy, the robots you beat up are just regular robots, and everyone else looks like what I see in my mind's eye when I try to imagine "a RWBY character who only shows up in one episode", or "dollar store Promare". There's a guy who does JoJo poses, when you pick up collectables an announcer says "Excellent!" following by some electric guitar noodling. It's an original IP in the literal sense of not being directly based on an existing license, but it feels so attached to pre-existing media that I don't think it stands particularly well on its own. A game referencing Xenogears is not a replacement for new games as interesting as Xenogears.

The game has rhythm but it has no bounce, it gives the player no medium of expression, it's a consistent, plodding march. I don't even know what's "Hi-Fi" about it, it's an MP3 player and some earbuds!

I dunno, I think this game kinda rocks? At least a little bit?

The soundtrack is phenomenal, swinging effortlessly between the bombastic freneticism of classic Sonic the Hedgehog styled tunes and more thoughtful pieces reminiscent of early synthesizer music.

I love the way the game controls, the way Sonic moves, I love the split second of tension as you approach an enemy and with just a tap of the spindash button reduce it to dust.

I like that the game makes deciding when to turn in your flickies to their ring shaped receptacle into a meaningful decision; do you send them home early so that you don't have to worry about losing one? Or do you hang onto all five of them for a points bonus, and to be able to use them to collect powerups that Sonic can't reach on his own?

I love the game's lively animation and cutscenes. I love that each level has a new element to keep things fresh (even if some of the levels are rather visually busy).

I love how Panic Puppet Zone throws you for a loop; up until that point, every area of the game is split into zones, each with only 5 enemies each, one for each flicky. In Panic Puppet Zone, enemies don't drop flickies anymore; the first Act has only 5 total (the fewest of any stage in the game) and all of them are in a kind of bespoke container, and the second Act has none at all! With flickies and enemies completely mechanically separated, the final Zone of the game is able to throw way more enemies at the player, but because of how few flickies their are, rushing to the end as fast as possible is more viable than ever.

The game is not perfect. It's a little long, I was a bit surprised that Gene Gadget Zone was not the final level. The Final Fight, which I believe is only accessible if you collect all of the chaos emeralds, is pretty much unfair and I will openly admit to using the Steam version's Rewind feature to get through it. Outside of the two final bosses, I only died twice. Once was right after leaving a bonus area, and spawning back into the main level with no rings, and immediately dying to a spike trap. The other time was when I lost my fire shield power up in Volcano Valley Zone, which is about as disastrous as losing all of your power ups in a Gradius game.

I like that at the end of the game's final level, the entrance to the final boss arena is a tube that goes up a giant Eggman statue's enormous nostril.

Personally, I think it truly is... a blast 😏

I walked from the living room to my bedroom to start writing this review. When I went back to the living room, a cutscene was still playing, twice. Anyway...

I'll admit, if it weren't for the game being on deep markdown, coupled with my bizarre feelings of obligation to be at least somewhat knowledgeable on all pop culture matters of my favorite types of media, I never would have even considered playing this game. Nonetheless: holy hot shit, is this really what "triple A single player experiences" are today?

The gameplay is miserable, the characters are insufferable. I constantly feel like I'm being treated like an idiot. This game makes me feel like everything after the Super Nintendo was a mistake.

I want to emphasize in this particular example that a half star rating from me does not necessarily mean that the game is completely without merit; the environments are fine, for example. A rating like this just means that this is a game that I deeply regret having played.

I love quest logs, affinity charts, dialogue trees, weapon wheels, the Pokédex. I love systems, I love rules, I love formal standards. I love when every button, every menu widget, does the exact thing I expect it to do from playing other games in the genre. I love when the only remotely unique things about a piece of media lie entirely within its content rather than its form. Weenie worm’s voice actor liked my tweet “who up playin with their weenie worm” so I’m basically legally obligated not to give this game a half star.

Most of the people who tell you they want games to be seen as art are lying.

I don't just mean in the sense that "gamers want games to be art but complain when people critique their problematic elements". That is true, but moreover, another side mostly composed of quirky indie fans often gets ignored. Most of the people who talk about "games as art" are really talking about "art as games". People have ideas about what makes great art: stories, characters, music, atmosphere, visuals, animation, setting; this is what a game needs to be great art, it needs to have the same elements that make literature great, or film. Most of these people will say that in order to be art, games have to "more than just games". Some will even say that games need to stop being games altogether.

The Witness may be the single greatest game as a piece of art yet, and it may never get the credit it deserves simply because it is a video game, and it isn't trying to be something else. The way it so totally and coherently expresses itself through its communication and psychology, through its singular mechanic of movement. Navigation in macrocosm and microcosm. It's a game you play on a virtual island, a game you play on a screen within a screen, a game that you play in your head.

Dark Souls is a beautiful forest full of ugly trees, a master's painting held together with duct tape and hot glue.

Coming back to Dark Souls and beating it for the first time in at least a couple years, it was honestly shocking how well-paced the game was compared to how I remember it. I remember the first time I played this game I spent more than ten hours just trying to ring the first bell, wrestling with complex, unfamiliar controls and the nuances of the combat. The latter half of the game is generally considered worse, though I've also generally considered it to be easier. I wonder to what degree that might have been warped by the fact that Anor Londo is, ostensibly, the last time in the game that the player is really asked to learn something new, the learning curve being mistaken for the difficulty curve.

Visually it's mostly aged surprisingly well, character detail and texture quality is largely more than acceptable, especially for the time. Even if the specular effects on reflective surfaces don't look particularly "natural", they look good, and definitely more striking than the more recent remastered version. The main blemish is that with the DSfix mod, playing with much greater visual clarity than any official release has offered (due to both resolution and adjustable depth of field), the pop-in is really noticeable; there are times when entering a small room, you will see objects appear in the opposite corner as you pass through the door.

Combat is the main area where I think the first few of these games don't quite knock it out of the park, though fighting regular enemies here is typically more than manageable. Boss fights are probably the single greatest weakness of this game. Many of them are total pushovers, and when they do present a challenge they either highlight how unrefined this is compared to future installments, or are just plain bad.

But, Dark Souls more than makes up for it by having one of the most interesting worlds ever seen in a video game, both in its narrative elements, and perhaps more importantly in its construction. From creation myth to conspiracy, from the cathedrals to the sewers to the rot, fire, death, and mysteries further down. Everything has its place, and every place fits perfectly together. Though, the individual areas themselves are often small or barren, with many failing to offer the same kinds of gauntlets seen in both Demon's Souls and in future games. Demon Ruins and Lost Izalith are the obvious worst offenders, and are typically argued to be flat out unfinished, though Darkroot and Blighttown don't feel much better.

Dark Souls is more than the sum of its parts though, and even when those parts don't shine on their own, they at least give a strong thematic support to the rest of the package.

Wow! This game has pretty much no redeeming qualities!

Everything about the gameplay is horrible. It doesn't feel good to control; the main characters themselves are bad enough but the vehicle sections are even worse. They didn't really put any thought into how ranged weapons would work in 3D space, so they just let you lock onto enemies, even in side scrolling sections.

The intro stage is one of the worst in the series. At the end of the first 3D section there's a door that can only be unlocked after doing a weird little "puzzle" that acts as a check to see if the player understands how the lock on function works. Metroid Prime starts with a similar target practice "puzzle", and putting the two side by side just shows off how bizarre and unintuitive X7's lock-on system is by comparison. Then, in Zero's portion of the stage, there's an area where the screen won't scroll until some number of enemies are defeated, and they just spawn right on top of the player.

The cutscenes are atrocious, whether they're pre-rendered videos, text over images, or made with the in-game graphics. There's an early cutscene, right after beating the intro stage; a text box appears at the bottom of the screen as an image sets the scene. Axl is already in the image, but a second render of him is overlaid on top of the main image when he speaks. By the end of the cutscene, Axl, Signas, X, and Zero are all rendered in front of the background image, and they're all in random poses completely ignoring any context of the conversation or framing of the scene. There's a level transition where the camera just hangs on the player standing on an airship for a solid 10 seconds or so, I legitimately thought the game had bugged out. Sometimes when a cutscene uses in-game graphics, or after a boss has been defeated, the camera will just zoom into a random point in space, filling the screen with a blurry mess of blown up PS2 quality textures.

Navigating the UI in between missions is impressively frustrating. The first time you clear a stage, the game explains to you how the ranking system works, what factors control your rank; the Zero games don't do this because A: those games respect the player enough to know that someone game savvy enough to care about their rank can probably intuit how it works on their own, and B: the Zero games use a much more clear scoring system that tells you exactly how much of your percentage is affected by what factors on the scorecard itself.

Every time you want to change menus, go to the save screen, go to the level select screen, the game asks "are you sure?" and the default cursor position is always "no". When you finish the intro stage and are given the level select screen, the game gives you a lore blurb on each of the eight levels one by one. When you pick a level, the game spends time explaining how the character select screen works (it does this because the level and character screens use weird radial menus that aren't visually coherent enough for some players to immediately understand). When you switch from the level select menu to the options menu, the game explains how the options menu works.

In each main stage, you can rescue two NPCs who will give you a chip to add points to one of your characters' three skills; the game gives you a blurb about how "rescuing people can get you upgrade chips!" every time you enter the upgrade menu, even if you are upgrading twice in a row from the same level. Once again, after distributing your points, the game will ask if you're sure about your selection, and the cursor will default to "no".

Some of the levels in this game are split into as many as 4 or 5 sections, all stitched together by loading screens. Several times throughout a level, a character will ask you to hit a button prompt to receive a hint, shouting "Can you hear me? [Current player character]?" Many levels consist of copy and pasted assets, sometimes with a change in hue. Red, blue, and green airships. Orange and blue virtual reality hexagons.

The difficulty is ridiculous, and after multiple attempts at playing through the game on the standard difficulty I gave up, I finished the game on the Legacy Collection's "Rookie Hunter" mode. Most of the time it feels like your health is infinite in this mode, but I still almost died in several of the boss fights. The only time that I did die in Rookie Hunter mode was in the motor bike stage, because of the time limit. Unlike previous games bike levels, which force you into a high speed auto-scroller, in this one you need to go as slow as possible in order to not miss the tight turns you have to make to pick up all of the bombs you need to diffuse.

The voice acting is embarrassing, but that's nothing out of the ordinary for Mega Man. What is out of the ordinary is the fact that I don't remember a single song from this game's soundtrack.

Burn to the ground, Mega Man X7.

Elden Ring caught me completely off guard.

Prior to the game’s release people would ask me of I was “hyped” for it. I could only describe what I felt as a dull excitement. I knew that I would probably enjoy it, but I also felt like I knew exactly what to expect, and that the game would be nothing more than that, and nothing less at best. I didn’t ignore pre-release coverage of the game, but I didn’t really absorb it either. Pre-release coverage of most games is kind of useless to me, I don’t know what parts of marketing and previews I can really trust until I have the game in my hands. I saw the game, I watched others play the network test, but I didn’t have any real frame of reference for what exactly was going on or how it fit together.

My first run felt like I was going through the game at a breakneck pace. While I struggled early on, once I got some momentum I was killing many of the bosses on my first try. While I spent a good portion of my playthrough exploring the game naturally, at a certain point in the game I stopped doing optional content, and tried to rush to the end. I wanted to kill two birds with one stone: ignoring optional areas meant that I would have something new to do on subsequent playthroughs, and in reaching the end I would finally know the limits of the game’s scope and could play more leisurely, without such fervent thirst for whatever grand surprise could be next.

Even playing the game this way, it took 10 days of treating the game like a second job to beat it.

I remember when I was a kid I watched my dad reach Ganon’s Castle in Ocarina of Time. An area of the dungeon presents the player with about half a dozen paths laid out in a large circular room (or at least as circular as a room could be on the N64). Each of these doors lead to a short gauntlet, but I couldn't help but imagine: what would it be like if this style of action-adventure game had a Super Mario 64-style hub area. Demon’s Souls is perhaps the closest thing we ever got to the idea in my head, but it also made me realize that the hub world was never really the important part.

What I really wanted was an action-adventure game with environments that were varied, striking, unique, and imaginative. An action-adventure game that was willing to trade a realistic environment for an absolutely incomparable one. Early 3D games often made unusual choices in how to portray their settings, and while this more primitive aesthetic was born out of limitation, its abstract qualities allow us in retrospect to assign it certain romantic characteristics completely absent from even the most contemporary and sophisticated attempts at naturalism. Elden Ring may be the only modern game I have ever seen that so consistently offers up such numerous and diverse visuals of this same character, but with cutting intentionality.

The entirety of the Lands Between feels like an old secret, everything feels as impossible and forbidden as Ash Lake. Ash Lake, buried beneath a difficult downward platforming section, tucked away behind multiple trick walls in an out of the way corner of one of Dark Souls’ more sprawling areas, was something that From Software did not expect every player to see. In Elden Ring, virtually everything beyond the introduction and before one of the later dungeons is optional, and not just in the sense that it can be bypassed or circumvented. On my third playthrough I used a guide and tried to see as much of the game as I possibly could, and to try and play through each area in some semblance of an “appropriate order”, and I’m now confident that From Software did not really want people to play the game this way. There is so much content in this game that feels like it doesn’t want to be found, and having spoken to other players both online and in-person I know that many people miss even the more major areas in the game. While Ash Lake was a single hidden area, Elden Ring is an entire game that does not expect the vast majority of its players to see its whole, a game so vast and so truly free that even a person who has seen it all would have trouble feeling absolutely certain of it.

Of all the modern niceties that Elden Ring forgoes, its lack of progression trackers is one of the most appreciated absences. From annualized franchises to series reinventions, nearly every game of this type is constantly presenting the player with fractions: you have done X amount of objectives, and there are Y amount in the game. Breath of the Wild’s shrines, Forza Horizon’s races, all kinds of statistics shown during loading screens and in menus. Elden Ring lets you mark graces and place pins on your map screen, and you could use this, for example, to keep track of which dungeons you have or have not completed, but you can’t be sure for yourself that you’ve found all of them, or that you’ve found everything within. The first time that the player finds a dungeon behind an illusory wall, the first time they find a dungeon with multiple bosses, the first time they find a dungeon within a dungeon within a dungeon, how can they ever be sure?

In this sense, Elden Ring might be a game that, as far as the design of typical modern open world game is concerned, does a lot of things “wrong”. Whether its the complaints that some people have made about the minute details of its user interface and experience, or simple basic facts like From Software’s decision to not make this a direct continuation any of their more recognizable intellectual properties, people are having some trouble processing the idea that Elden Ring is not a sleek, edgeless product. This is almost without a doubt simply a result of Elden Ring’s massive popularity, having doubled the sales of From’s previous bestselling title; however, it is frankly embarrassing that we’re having the same tired conversations about this game that we were having about Dark Souls over a decade ago.

The game’s great triumph lies primarily in its structure. The reality of open world games is that the open world is almost always something necessarily separate from the rest of the game, and Elden Ring is no different. This is not a bad thing, the key to making a good open world game simply lies in making both the open world and the rest of the game equally interesting. From the loose platforming and exploration of the open world, to the careful crawl of dungeoneering, to the tight and tense combat and boss fights, Elden Ring’s core loop funnels the player into a more perfect rhythm than almost any other game of its kind.

I was a bit worried initially that background music would be more prominently featured throughout the game compared to previous From titles, but I have to admit they’ve knocked it out of the park. Every track so effectively created its mood, from the mystery of Liurnia, the oppressive noise of the Caelid wilds, the somber aura of Altus. I love how much of the game’s music is diegetic, the horns of the capital, the singing in the underground river city, the stringed instruments carried by the merchants. Where previous From games merely created feelings of tension in boss fights and relief in the hub areas, Elden Ring’s music gives the world its own sense of culture.

The only significant problem I have with the game is a handful of late-game bosses. It’s a particular shame both because the end of the game is basically just four back-to-back boss fights and its kind of a sour note to end on, and because if most of these bosses' individual phases were separate fights they would be some of my favorites that From has ever done. As they are though, they are at best brutal gauntlets requiring such a degree of consistent execution that it becomes difficult to really appreciate the encounter, and at their worst, they are Malenia, blade of Miquella.

I said once, and I’m not the only one, that “Elden Ring is someone’s dream game, but I’m not sure if it’s mine.” I now think that Elden Ring is a game I could not personally have dreamt in the first place. It’s a game that delivers on promises unkept by so many other games, that so thoroughly fleshes out ideas that other games only hint at. Often when a new game comes out I find myself wanting to replay games in the same series or genre to see how my perspective on them has shifted; no other game has forced me to reevaluate so many of its predecessors. No other game has so insistently made me grapple with the possibility that the best game I will ever play is one that has yet to be made.

I can barely approach Mega Man Zero 3 as a "game".

I received Mega Man Zero 3 as a Christmas gift from my grandmother, it was the last Christmas gift I would receive from her. Her and her coworkers had pooled their money together to afford gifts for me and her other grandkids, she likely had put most of her own money into cancer treatment. My parents have a digital video camcorder tape of me tearing open the wrapping paper and chanting the game's name. I played the game in the living room at my uncle's house, where we typically had our Christmas dinner, and my parents watched over my shoulder. When they saw that Zero held a gun which fired bullets, they decided that after we left my uncle's house, we would go to the local game store and trade it in for something else (that "something else" would be Pokemon Ruby).

Since then I have played Mega Man Zero 3 many times, with many different devices. I have at various points owned at least four different Game Boy Advance cartridges of the game, two different DS cartridges of the collection, I have digitally purchased the game on Wii U, I have digitally purchased the collection on Switch. None of the versions of the game that I have now are the cartridge that she gave me.

When my grandmother died, my father inherited her car, and when I became old enough to drive it became my first car. After four years, I took the car to a mechanic to get the brakes checked out; the car was old enough that the rusted insides were falling out of the bottom and crushing the brake line. Cars of the same make and model surely exist, but they will not be hers. When I moved out of my parents' house, I moved into her old apartment building, but not into the same room. I have two music boxes, one is an Eda Mann Songbirds of America porcelain sculpture which plays "Somewhere My Love" from the film Dr. Zhivago, the other is a San Francisco Music Box Company sculpture of an iris flower that plays "Wind Beneath My Wings". My great grandmother, who also lived in the same building until she passed away, had these same music boxes; rather, she had identical music boxes, I have these objects which look and function the same way, but they are not the exact literal objects that I once held in my hands as a child.

But maybe it doesn't matter.

"Don't you feel any attachment? Are you really prepared to spend the rest of your life in that cheap fake?"

"As long as your heart is your own, you are Zero. The one and only..."

I've seen people on forums express the sentiment that caring about the story in Mega Man is pointless, that any focus on the games' story only makes them worse, but the setting and characters still seem to hold a particular importance. The Mega Man franchise is stuck in such a terrible stagnant limbo that the classic series has reached an eleventh installment (after a decade long hiatus) without any meaningful event transpiring. Any brand alternative to Mega Man, whether conceptualized by former Mega Man creatives or by fans and imitators, has failed to reach the same cultural significance despite delivering the trademark jumping and shooting.

Multiple objects can carry the same heart across time and space, hundreds of thousands of computer chips can all carry the same intellectual property. Some parts of the Mega Man series I can genuinely appreciate as interesting and well designed video games, and others I could critique for their flaws. Some parts of the Mega Man series have their more technical qualities so obscured by sentimentality that trying to talk about them feels like applying a rubric to a comfort blanket, or ranking your childhood stuffed animals in a numbered list.

Some games feel like they were made by an artist, some games feel like they were made by a storyteller, some games feel like they were made a game designer, some games feel like they were made by a corporation, some games feel like they were made a programmer.

Mercury Meltdown is the kind of game that I feel like even an indie dev might not make today, certainly not with any expectation of commercial viability. Maybe something like this might be made in the smallest scale possible for a game jam or something. Its relatively narrow focus on soft-body physics and color theory combined with its unabashed use of what feels like surely must be "programmer art" makes it feel completely alien to today's video game industry paradigm. It opens with a reference to a C64 loading screen, it has autosave but it's quite slow; you might spend as much time in the menus between levels as you do in gameplay, even if you always select the "go to next level" option after finishing each stage. The ability to save ghost players and replays, it's a feature set we might consider rather unusual for a console game, especially for the time.

This is the version of the game that I played when it was new, so this is the version that I sought out. It is somewhat surprising to me that this is a port of a PSP game given that its liquid physics seemed kind of crazy at the time, but today it is not surprising at all that the original version of the game was the kind of game that had a person's full name in the title. It's just that sort of old fashioned piece of software, like an Atari 2600 game just showed up more than 20 years later.

It's like Monkey Ball meets Marble Blast injected with a variety of its own weird game-ey concepts, the kinds of things that feel like they could only exist in obscure PC shovelware, 100,000 game in 1 type stuff. I want to be clear: I am absolutely delighted that there is a major release for the best-selling console of all time that plays like this and is available on a physical disc. A decade and a half or so ago, this is just what a video game was still allowed to be, and I think there is something genuinely beautiful about that.