el b3313 es mejor castillo pero el final de mario 64 -> felicidad pura, majia potajia, peak

a veces pienso que en cuanto a sensibilidad estos de nintendo fueron prácticamente insuperables en los 80s y 90s dentro de este medio. cosas tan pequeñitas como ayudar o jugar con los npcs en tus viajes para que luego los créditos tal cual álbum de fotos te recuerden a los amigos que encontraste en el camino, y terminar con la despedida, de mario, la princesa, los kinopio (y por consiguiente el juego, como un amigo) despidiéndose alzando los brazos como si de alguien partiendo en un viaje lejano en tren o barco se tratase mientras la cámara lentamente se aleja al cielo

"can you hear the princess calling?"

perdón por el post webon después de ponerme a shorar con el final del juego por décima vez, para mañana recapacito

those mfers made sigurd of all people say justice is an illusion lol, memes become real
have they even played genealogy

i'm done
f u maeda
f u nami komuro
f u intelligent systems

now if you excuse me i'll be afk becoming the joker after this

Originally posted here on 26/09/2022: https://xatornova.blogspot.com/2022/09/gothic-wa-mahou-otome.html

Microtransactions, archetypal anime girls and an overload of monetary systems are enough alarm signs that the game should be nothing more than a product to shamelessly steal the money from the average otaku. Though since a game is not what it seems to be, but rather what it actually happens to be, a small peek at the mobile game "Gothic Wa Mahou Otome" immediately reveals its quality as an action game, where the tactile control in combination with shooting game mechanics gives birth to one of the greatest exemplars of the aesthetic capability of movement in the genre.

The key of its success is in the scoring system. To obtain points, naturally a player has to hit the enemies in a stage. However, numerous variables are added that let the player increase their score. Firstly, the avatar is surrounded by a visible ring for the player, which extends its radius if they keep shooting down enemies. If the target is within this circle, the power of the shot is increased, and with that the score of the player. Additionally, if the player keeps hitting enemies continuously to enemies without getting hit themself, the score multiplier will increase. Thus, the player is met with an apparently contradictory objective: To keep themself near the objective that it wishes to attack, and to avoid crashing onto them or their bullets. In this way, the player is unavoidably subject to decide constantly in the best course of action to increase their score.

It is through this that the mechanics of the game acquire higher relevance. The higher the ranking that the player gets at the end of each level, which relies on the score, chaining of hits or amount of taken hits, the higher is the amount of resources such as money to buy temporal upgrades, and through this the player has an incentive to improve their performance to continue with the game in the most difficult stages. Furthermore, the higher difficulties, which hand out the best resources, consist of an immediate response from the enemies, with bullets of them in retaliation that are directed towards the position of the avatar to force them to distance themself from their target.

All of these elements in conjunction conform a frenzy where the player is encouraged to master the system to continue and take decisions in seconds, in order to fully take the attention of the player to their surroundings. To enhance the action through chaining mechanics had already been explored by director Tsuneki Ikeda in his previous titles, particularly his 2002 masterpiece "DoDonPachi DaiOuJou". Even though this title doesn't have the trance that comes from a complete and continuous adventure that arises in a traditional arcade game, where defeat used to imply to restart the playthrough from scratch, Ikeda manages to construct a different one through deepening the scoring system and the tactile controls, which brings with itself a cathartic sense of examining and scratching the screen to look for an opening. It is a feeling that isn't common even among other mobile shooting games, such as the ports of Ikeda's games in touch devices, or free-to-play shooting games like "Azur Lane" and "World Witches: United Front", which is representative of the director's control over action games and his evolution as a developer.

As a cherry on top, the game happens to be an inexhaustible source of experimentation, given that the shooting pattern of the avatar changes with each character, and which ones the player has to their disposition is random. One can have a short-distance pattern, another one is long distance, yet weak, another one targets behind, or to the sides, other ones have unorthodox patterns, and naturally, this affects how the player approaches enemies to obtain better scores. Thus, the player can experiment with different stages, which are not just the main campaign, which provides more than one hundred of challenges, but also with different additional scenarios that are updated every once in a while, surpassing thus even the overwhelming feeling of possibilities in Junichi Kashiwagi's "Dariusburst Chronicle Saviours".

"Gothic wa Mahou Otome" is currently only available in Japan, and it is to expect that after its unavoidable finale, it will be available for international audiences as a paid game, in the same way as its peer, Nanoha Hata's masterful "Arkanoid vs. Space Invaders", because just like that game in its original state as another free-to-play experience, was able to demonstrate the vitality and inheritance of the arcade action in our current times.

Originally posted here: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cfso_vnA-FE/

An autobiographical story of a transgender woman and her traumatic experiences with sex work. Personal and intense in its prose, abstract in its presentation. Defamiliarization and impersonation as representation of the coping mechanism, with a melancholic, surreal sea of consciousness bringing life to fuzzy, drowned memories. And a fitting pixel-art aesthetic - not just a stylistic choice born from lack of resources but the representation of the raw feelings of an innocent, hurt mind

Originally posted on my blog years ago, edited with just the parts that talk about Pokémon Red. Note that since this was written a while ago, it doesn't fully reflect how I write nowadays or think about the game today, although I stand by the general idea: https://xatornova.blogspot.com/2018/06/pokemon-toy-adventure.html

Pokémon was born out of Satoshi Tajiri's will of sharing his experiences as a child to search for, capture and collect insects outside his home, alongside the curiosity to see the creatures and the ingenuity to get them. To him, the games of his era could be better, which is why this fixation could help him to reach the desired level of sophistication. Many elements are in fact coherent with this approach: The focus on capturing wild enemies, their differences with domesticated creatures, random encounters exclusively on wild areas, the intent of making each creature unique in elemental affinity and moveset, the turn-based combat as a representation of giving orders to your creatures, etc. To achieve this, Pokémon needs a world where the player can navigate through, explore and discover. Game Freak would take for this the established structure by Dragon Quest as a stat progression through accumulation of experience points to gather levels alongside a lineal advance led by a narrative, and the one by SaGa as a progression of stats depending on the player's decisions during battle. The problem arises because of this: By using established mechanics, the developers didn't take into account how they diminish the creatures' importance and destroy the interest on its world, failing thus in its communicative intent.

Japanese role-playing games that are inheritors of Dragon Quest's formula allow to increase stats according to the amount of defeated enemies, and the issue shared by them is the possibility of confronting enemies indifinitely without penalization, since it's possible to position oneself near a healing spot while obtaining experience. The consequence of this is that by accumulating enough levels, enemies stop being a menace due to the player having stats so high that the opponent cannot compete with them. Due to this procedure being allowed to the player as an unlimited free resource, its presence, regardless that it's optional, is enough for the player to unconsciously lose respect to the given world, since how to get through the world becomes solvable and predictable. A lot of games attempt to mitigate this issue due to status effects that are hard to compensate, instant death, reduction of experience gain in high levels, or adjustment of enemy parameters to the player's level.

Pokémon Red doesn't just lack something to prevent this, but it worsens it by allowing the player to heal without fee and save anywhere, and by adding the stat progression system inherited from SaGa to represent the superiority of trained creatures against wild Pokémon. By making an enemy faint, one obtains stat experience according to the type of enemy that increases a certain stat. Since these points are added directly to the current stats, and enemies lack access to them, there's a considerable superiority from the player above other trainers even on the same level. There could be a nuance in customization by deciding which stats to increase, but in Pokémon Red this doesn't happen since it's possible to get the highest possible stats on every stat, as well as a lack of transparence of the system to the player, and finally because there isn't a single enemy in the game that poses a threat enough for such customization to be relevant. Not even the final bosses, alluded by the game as the most powerful foes, are saved from this because their creatures' movesets are barely even designed, with choices as rancid as using basic moves or without type variety to exploit elemental effectiveness. For example, the final boss's Arcanine has Ember, the weakest Fire-type move, and his Rhydon has Fury Attack, a weak move that doesn't even have the Pokémon's same type and is more proper of non-evolved enemies from the start of the game than an endgame boss.

In addition to these elements, the player has the capability to use items during combat, from healing items or reviving items to statboosters of cumulative effect to four times the original value. Here opens itself another gap between player and opponent, since the few enemies that have access to items are just limited to healing, have them in very little amount, and they use it with a very deficient artificial intelligence. Since these items are available in shops to be bought repeatedly, with a maximum of ninety-nine of the same type in the inventory, the player's creatures become invincible tanks, capable of eliminating opponents in one or two hits, regardless of the type of their move, except for total immunity to a certain type.

These two qualities promote a playstyle focused on raising few, if not just one Pokémon, generally the one received at the start, and because of this, the relevance of other creatures is offset. If just one monster is needed to complete the game, regardless whom the player uses and who the opponent is, what purpose does serve then to differentiate the fauna beyond cosmetics if they work similarly on a mechanical level? What's the practical incentive to gather different Pokémon beyond their appearance? At the end, the sentiment left by the game is to be looking for collectible cards instead of searching and catching different beings, and in a game where its fauna is in the foreground, it's disappointing that their importance is superficial. Pokémon Red attempts to lessen this issue by limiting the progress with artificial barriers, only solvable with special moves to lighten dark areas, pushing boulders, cutting trees or swimming in the ocean, thus forcing the player to look for creatures who can learn these moves.

This approach only turns looking for Pokémon into a task, a forced process in an artificial way instead of being born out of one's own interest, but above all, it leads to the second big issue: The implausibility of the world due to its eagerness to be servile to the player. The aforementioned elements contribute to this, since allowing the player advantages that the enemy doesn't have suggests an environment to the protagonist's mercy, but this is increased by how much the player is handholded through the game. Since the cities are visited in a specific order, the path is structured as a hallway, and the progress is limited by arbitrary barriers that are only unlocked once the player defeats a boss, the development of the player isn't natural, and one is conscious of a repetitive sequence of defeating the level boss an accessing the next level, turning the perception of its world in less the natural habitat that it wants to suggest and more a series of levels designed for the player not to be lost into.

Game Freak didn't have much confidence when creating Pokémon Red, since a lot of the planned content was cut, and this game is plagued by programming errors that can render the cartridge unusable, which is why it's no exaggeration to call it an unfinished game. The developers were conscious of the limitations of this system, and because of it the sequels would complete the original idea or adjust the formula to attempt to lessen its gravity.

[...]

In spite of the lackluster design and programming errors, it's precisely the first generation the one closer to [its] ideal and the one that expresses it with most strength. It's probably unintentional and a result of technical limitations, but the first generation is the only one that abstains of any forced explanations, without tutorials, without a type chart, or even an explanation of what moves can do, relying exclusively on the player discovering by themself the innate effectiveness of their creatures. It's also the one whose simple story is more fitting to the innocent perspective of a child that runs away from home and discovers the world, in contrast to the plots filled with ideological, apocalyptic conspiracies that flood the series from Ruby onwards, which regardless of their quality, dillute the approach of the personal journey by relegating the player to a secondary role [...]. Finally, because in spite of its artificiality, it's the game that's built the most around mystery (one of the most positive of Dragon Quest's influences), with the Victory Road accessible from the start, but impenetrable without badges, with the wonder of what's there beyond with each unlocked limit the more one ascends to the summit, and the most powerful creatures are optional, barely even alluded by other characters, and hidden in the depths of the earth (Zapdos, Articuno, Mewtwo), or behind numerous levels of training (Dragonite), without forced events, and the merit on obtaining them is on the player. It's an effect that its remake cannot simulate properly due to the additions from the third generation that removes some of these aspects [to "fix" and "update" the game]. Unfortunately, this isn't worth much and doesn't save the game because it vanishes quickly, and relies exclusively on the game being unbeknown to the player. Once the inner workings of the game are deciphered and the unbalance is noticeable, the mystery disappears. Precisely because of this, Pokémon has been uncapable of replicating the social phenomenon that it was back in the 90s, when rumours about what was possible or not in the games ran rampant, and legends about hidden mythical creatures like Mew were in the word of mouth.

A notoriously deficient combat system alongside a linear navigation in hallways in a game where fighting and exploration is the main action results in an anodyne experience, but one that could be compensated by other aspects. However, that these two aspects undermine Tajiri's original intent drastically results in a failure. [...]

When one starts a Pokémon playthrough for the first time, a Pokémon expert welcomes us with the promise of a legend unfolding upon our path in a world filled with dreams and adventures. Though nowadays, coming back to the games as an adult makes one realize about the unfulfilled promise, and that the adventure that took over our dreams isn't more than a toy. A simple plastic trinket.

(Originally published in this blog entry in March 2022)
https://xatornova.blogspot.com/2022/03/robotron-2084-twin-stick-apocalypse.html

There is something strangely beautiful about the end of the world in art and the reaction that it draws from its characters, particularly the feelings that it gets from the people facing the inevitable demise, because it is then that you see them at their rawest. Robotron 2084 fits that category as an abstract portrayal of the collapse of civilization by the hands of machines, and to that purpose it sets the player as a survivor in the middle of the catastrophe, surrounded by robots chasing down the remnant humans. You can opt to save them, but the main challenge is to get past the waves of machines. The aim of the developers is that the player feels panic in an apocalyptic scenario, and to that purpose there are two sticks, one for movement and the other one to shoot in a direction, as the survivor's defense mechanism. The repercussion this has on the player is that there's a need to coordinate betwen two forms of reaction: To dodge and to shoot, and these two draw your attention away from each other and conflict with each other, and the result is that there's a dissasociation between these two understandings of your avatar that leads to a chaotic state of mind that turns the attention of the player to the game, their surroundings and their position.

Now, this is a precursor to the twin-stick shooter genre, and great games have been born from this control scheme, such as The Binding of Isaac and Assault Android Cactus, but to me, the original Robotron 2084 remains the strongest because the feeling that it awakes is not only an adrenaline rush but also a desperate, raw feeling that complements the game's aesthetic vision. It does this in a purer state, because your bullets can't be improved and go in just eight directions, which means that unlike a lot of other modern shoot 'em ups, precision is also important in this game, and ultimately, because its nature as an arcade game turns around the power fantasy aspect that may arise from this. In Robotron 2084, defeat is inevitable, because no matter how many screens you go through, eventually you will lose, and the enemies win. There is no end to this game, and the developers transform this arcade convention into something beautiful. It reminds to the endings of Crisis Core, or Halo: Reach that came out decades after, but in a whole game dedicated to that feeling, without their sentimentality. You just fight through waves of enemies until your body and mind can't go on, and you succumb. That is when the game is really over. No extra continues. That's the canonical end. As a portrayal of the end of the world, it is successful and radical unlike almost any other shooter that I have seen.

(Originally published in this blog entry in March 2022)
https://xatornova.blogspot.com/2022/03/pac-man-pleasure-of-maze.html

When we think about Pac-Man, one of its indelible images involves the eponymous character running away from some colorful ghosts and later him being the one that chases them after getting a Power Pellet in order to eliminate them. Because of this, Pac-Man is usually cited as the first game with power-ups. However, the ghosts have a shorter duration of vulnerability after each level, and once you reach the twenty-first screen, those Power Pellets have no impact on them, and instead ghosts are faster, which represents how little actually mattered to director Toru Iwatani to entrance the player with the satisfaction of overcoming enemies they were previously weak to.
Pac-Man is a maze game where the player has to obtain all pellets and avoid ghosts that pursue the player to get to the next screen. Before its release, mazes in videogames were more closely associated with role-playing games such as Oubliette and Beneath Apple Manor, two great games of their generation that broadened the understanding of navigation in dungeons as social spaces or as a source of horror. However, the maze in Pac-Man is seen from a top-down perspective, while every element from role-playing games is absent. This is due to Iwatani's mechanical understanding of games, a consequence of his background as an engineer, and his interest in the development of pinball machines (which initially led to his first video game, Gee Bee, to have similar rules to pinball), where the immediate legibility of objectives is of paramount importance, and the abstraction of sensations is conveyed mechanically.

This element is precisely what differentiates Pac-Man from previous representations of a maze: Its economy in language, and its mechanization and legibility of simple components. If labyrinthis in role-playing games derive their strength from draining the player's resources, Pac-Man replaces this with the constant chase, where the game demands attention to avoid defeat and tests the mental fortitude of the player. By making the avatar move automatically in the direction it is facing, the implication of the player with the events on screen is bolstered, since not paying attention leads to not making decisions such as turning on bifurcations, or deciding between avoiding enemies and getting pellets on time. Through these resources, Iwatani blends the action derived from the chase and avoiding enemies on time with the labyrinthine construction of spaces in a way that seems natural, almost obvious and easy.

It is this feeling of ease that led Pac-Man to have numerous successors in its generation, but the fundamental difference between Pac-Man and other maze chase games is the depth in the movement speed. The avatar goes faster when it is not consuming pellets, can turn corners faster than the enemies, and can get through the lateral tunnels faster as well. Through this alongside the increasing speed of the enemies after each level leads to frequent situations where a player about to be caught escapes by very little from the enemies, in dodges at the last second, through which the player has to utilize the maze layout and search for appropriate places to gain more speed while being aware of their position in the screen. This element is Iwatani's true finding with Pac-Man: The pleasure of the maze, and this quality is what gives it true significance above superficial elements such as having the first mascot character or being the first game with cutscenes, and makes it, four decades and many sequels and variants after its release, still resonate with firmness.

I made a video about this game for the 35th anniversary (it's on Spanish, but you can see English subtitles): https://youtu.be/8rqiakCOatU
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The importance of the original Super Mario Bros. can't be understated: It doesn't have to do with being a genre pioneer, since games like Jump Bug, Pitfall or Pac-Land already included the jump mechanic, and the Mario franchise already had two games behind its back: Donkey Kong and Mario Bros. It isn't about being the sidescrolling game either, since Pac-Land's and Jump Bug's also scrolled their screens alongside the player, and a few days after the original Super Mario we had Makaimura on the arcades, which also included the jump mechanic alongside a screen that followed the player. What differentiates Super Mario Bros. from its predecessors is the creation of a world surrounding a mechanic, specifically the jump.

Shigeru Miyamoto's focus is the direct perception of the interactive premise for the player's immersion, and for that purpose there is particular care to the tangible effect of the environments. In simpler terms, that you can perceive the worlds physically. The key element is the depth in the aerial maneuverability. Super Mario Bros. allows a detailed control of the avatar while moving in the air. The weight of gravity in the impulse, the inertia in the jump direction in opposition to the player's command, and the feeling to confront the game's physical laws. To redirect the path of the avatar the stronger one presses the button. Such capability gives the aerial space to take relevance in the gameplay, since it's how the player decides their position, and thus the player becomes conscious of its position at any moment.

To give purpose to these controls, the game turns jumping in the main form of interacting with the environment. Obstacles can be avoided through jumping, similarly to Pac-Land, which was Super Mario Bros.'s main inspiration, but enemies can be defeated if we step on them, and that becomes a step forward by adding variables that react to our presence. The other form of including the jump in the gameplay is to hit blocks. Some of them contain coins that allow an additional chance to continue if you collect hundred of them, others contain upgrades to take a hit, being able to attack at distance, or time-limited invincibility. Some of them contain extra lives, others can be broken to make a path, or even allow access to other areas. The content of the blocks isn't immediately obvious since its appearance doesn't follow a pattern. They can be signaled, they can appear as another type of block and they can even be invisible. Basically, they're a secret, and this gives the game the sense of hiding more than what it appears to have, since it's optional content.

The intention of a world with a hidden face is manifested through pipes that lead to underground (or even underwater) passages, or vines that climb up to a world hidden in the sky. Even passages outside of the conventional interface of the game. That's why the decision of verticality as an abstraction of depth takes paramount importance to build places far from the surface, from what we know at first sight, and the focus on the vertical jump becomes thus a coherent decision since those are places that aren't reachable by just jumping, and they're hidden to our virtual body.

Because of how important it is to the progress of the player alongside its integration with the main mechanic of the game, the presence of a hidden world becomes an omnipresent feeling that differentiates Super Mario Bros. from other platformers that came after due to its influence, even among its own successors, because it means that the player perceives, decides its progress and leaves its presence in the world through jumping. Miyamoto turned thus this mechanic as a vehicle to expand the possibilities of exploration and personal body expression in a way that thirty-five years later still remains radical.

There's a last design decision that is very special and I haven't covered yet, and it is not being able to turn back. It isn't due to technical limitations since many of the previously mentioned games allowed it. Not being able to turn back is a deliberate decision because it makes the player potentially miss content that they won't be able to get if they didn't know about it, and that resonates to a surprisingly more profound level: The possibility to have missed something, to not have visited a place in a journey, to have taken something for granted at a certain point in time, because there's no coming back. By appealing to this sensation, the game's world takes presence in the player's mind even after having left an area behind, or even the whole game, because there's the lingering feeling of everything we didn't know and everything that could have helped us. That feeling is absent in the Mario games that came to the west after this one, which gives the original an unique quality. It's this sentiment that immortalizes Shigeru Miyamoto's masterpiece beyond what it meant back in the 80s in front of its predecessors, and it still represents the promise of videogames of worlds that can still capture our imaginations and warp our minds to them.