diff --git a/drafts/Beyond the Boundary - Archery in Tactics Ogre.md b/drafts/Beyond the Boundary - Archery in Tactics Ogre.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..10b2dac --- /dev/null +++ b/drafts/Beyond the Boundary - Archery in Tactics Ogre.md @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +

+ + +Recently I managed to complete Tactics Ogre on the PSP (played on my Vita). Not the greatest feat, but considering how little time is available to me to play games, I was still rather satisfied. + +Besides being a through and through fantastic game that manages to give me many small puzzle-like battles, it is one of those games that manages to paint a thrilling story with just some chibi-super-kawaii sprites that are far more brutal than their stumpy little pixel limbs communicate. + +My favorite element though, didn’t occur to me until pretty far into the game (and would surely have made the previous skirmishes far more easygoing): The range of archers is Tactics Ogre is a truth with modifications. The full truth is that they can shoot beyond what the game indicates. In fact, if you have some highground, they can shoot far beyond the indication. + +This is some _half-blood-prince-crush-the-creature-with-a-silver-knife-to-get-the-good-juice-level-secret-skills-shit-dawg_! + +Really, the game told me the rules, and allowed me to go beyond them, without breaking anything (maybe except the balance). And what made it feel even better, was that I felt like I really knew the tiny crevices of knowledge and skill to play Tactics Ogre. diff --git a/drafts/Cloud Yelling.md b/drafts/Cloud Yelling.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..654b912 --- /dev/null +++ b/drafts/Cloud Yelling.md @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ + + +Half-rhetorically I might ask if something can be truly inoffensive. If I take offence at something precisely because it is inoffensive, it no longer is. If I defined it by how inoffensive it was, and it no longer is, is it then defined by how it is now offensive, or does it cease to be? + +I'm not sure I've ever seen a stand-up comedian and then thought "Yeah, now I think differently on this matter," and I suspect few people have. Maybe I'm wrong, but I get the impression they reflect a thinking in their audience and when popular thought becomes binary, so does this profession. Yet even if I agree with a point that is often made (or rather, probably because), that point becomes pretty trite. The idea of 'Cancel Culture,' and the debate about what you can and cannot say, and can and cannot make comedy about, is one single topic that is continued afterwards, at lunch breaks in all layers of society. + +I associate the side that says 'Cancel Culture isn't a thing' and 'comedy should have limits' with a historically anti-establishment, counter-cultural side. Which is just hilarious, because nothing could be more pro-corporation than putting limitations on speech. + +It's not that the proponents of those thoughts are in and of themselves big fans of corporations. Surely if prompted, they would rant tirelessly about the problems with the mega corporations and their influence. + +Yet no one likes good clean fun as much as Mickey Mouse. It is the most marketable thing in the world. When neither your product, your message, the culture around those, and the people who partake in it, offend, a big company can easily join in the conversation. + +And discourse that is welcoming to the family friendliness of Trevor Noah, is something where nothing interesting can ever happen. Only the generally accepted, inoffensive, non-radical thoughts. Sequels and remakes, market-research, projected earnings, memes and dunking, L's and W's. Undertale and Marvel movies. There is just nothing as fun as seeing the Twitter account for Burger King have real jolly time with the twitter account for Xbox. + +Whenever something new and mind numbingly vapid is declared the new thing to like, I try to just nod and say "good thing you like Arcane. I'm jealous of you. I could be a happier person." Yet, what I actually want is for us all to like media that is better. Media that doesn't have to have been whittled down by the Infinite Boardrooms of Prudes and Penis-skinned. It doesn't have to be smart. Not at all. By all means, let it be interesting AND retarded. + +Is there more to say on this? I made a game called 'Møgluder' with some friends. Calling a woman 'møgluder' is a prejorative along the lines of calling her a 'dumb cunt.' The common reaction among people who understand it, is either to take offense, or to go "lol bro, that's so stupid, awesome dude." Neither reaction was unexpected or disappointing. Sometimes it's just important to smear the entire bathroom in piss and semen, because they can't own you if they don't want to touch you. diff --git a/drafts/Entering the Quotidian of RPGs.md b/drafts/Entering the Quotidian of RPGs.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7111dd5 --- /dev/null +++ b/drafts/Entering the Quotidian of RPGs.md @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ + + +I can’t be the only one who experiences a sort of tranquility when playing an action game and everything just works. The rhythm of the play: Running ahead, shooting, dodging, reloading, and adapting. + +I often attribute this being in the flow to action games, but I realized, there is a great wonder to it when more quiet games like RPG’s have a flow you can achieve. + +It’s when the setting, story and systems coalesce into a sort of everyday-like quality, and I simply play the game as if I live that world, and the life available to me, is enough, because I tacitly accept that the game world is what it is, and isn’t trying to be more. + +Playing Fantasy Life on the 3DS and more recently Final Fantasy XV, there is a joy and danger in this. + +- In Fantasy Life I would spend time raising the levels of my character in various classes, perhaps sometimes spending a little too long crafting exquisite furniture that I could sell way above market price. +- In FFXV I’ve been living it up in Duscae, undertaking mundane fetch-quests, duking it out with wild-life and mechanical, medieval paratroopers, and trampling the flora with my beautiful giant bird. + +In Fantasy Life, and soon I expect, in Final Fantasy XV, my overparticipation in the everyday-like (the quotidian from the title) results in me feeling like the game has presented all it had to offer and I have tasted all I needed to. + +It’s definitely a sad experience in games with a larger overarching narrative to complete, but we all play games in different ways, and I definitely feel like it’s a wonderful facet of video games, that they can allow us to have a short taste of different daily life, that might be far more exciting than reality, yet (due to the necessary structure of becoming increasingly powerful and experienced in a gameplay loop) eventually feeling like even the life of a magical god-prince is boring enough to move on to something else. + +To eventually become boring isn’t a trait I’m striving for in Sodagirl, but it being a rather quiet game, letting players experience a different kind of everyday-life seems like quite a noble goal. diff --git a/drafts/Final Fantasy VII.md b/drafts/Final Fantasy VII.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a9c91e9 --- /dev/null +++ b/drafts/Final Fantasy VII.md @@ -0,0 +1,24 @@ +


+ + +The idea of replaying Final Fantasy VII has long been on my mind. Playing it in 1998 was definitely a turning point. Yet the discourse surrounding it, and experiences I've had since, has definitely altered my perception of the game. Playing Final Fantasy XII a couple of times made me believe the gameplay of Final Fantasy VII was slow and dull. Playing Bravely Second gave me the impression that the job system was the definitive method to customise my little warriors. Sitting in my dorm room bed in Japan and finally playing Final Fantasy IX, gave rise to the idea that, even for a Playstation 1 game, Final Fantasy VII was unforgivably ugly. Submerging myself in Tactics Ogre on my Vita mathematically proved that video game storytelling had reached its zenith on the Super Nintendo. And Final Fantasy VII Remake convinced me that the Midgar section was really the only noteworthy part of Final Fantasy VII. + +A few years ago, a bunch of people decided the subpar original translation of Final Fantasy VII needed to go. They were gonna do it right. I can verify they succeeded. Around the time I started playing Final Fantasy VII Remake, I loaded a Playstation 1 emulator with the _Beacause_ translation and the Chicago font, and tried to play the two versions concurrently. Eventually, around Wall Market, I fell off the original and focused on Final Fantasy VII Remake. Final Fantasy VII Remake, by the way, is an absolute triumph. Somehow, later, I decided to give it just one more shot. I must have achieved perfect Japanese Role-Playing Game synchronicity, because I proceeded to have some 38 hours of constant enjoyment. + +I'll start with the part I care the least about: the story. Yes, gasp indeed, dear non-existent reader. The narrative and how it's told is why we've never forgotten Final Fantasy VII. In this text I argue that it probably isn't the best part, which is saying a lot, because it is undeniably fabulous. It contains a plot development that is always mischaracterized as a twist, that shook the medium so profoundly, that people forgot about the part that was an actual plot-twist. The actual plot-twist is spectacular. Many hours before either of these events occur, there's a scene where the heroes go to the house of Aerith Gainsborough. Her mother recounts how she raised Aerith and the way this exposition happens, _shivered me timbers_. At one point, in the present, a textbox from the past appears. The camera pans up, barely keeping Aerith's Mother Elmyra, but not the other characters, in the shot. A diminutive Aerith descends the stairs, and as the camera now tracks her, the other characters are gone, and without cutting, we have seamlessly transitioned to a past event. As the flashback is told, the camera alternately pans right and left, each time returning to a different time-period in the same location as we are presently standing. Finally, it pans down again, and then back up, into the kitching in the present, in a different angle (which, remember, required rendering an entire extra background). Lord, I hope I appreciated this twenty years ago. I sure do now. There’s no need to mock the 3D characters. They did the best they could at the time. Yet they also compensated with every other tool in their inventory. Like Final Fantasy VII recently did, so too did Tactics Ogre on the Super Nintendo later on receive a tremendous retranslation (this one official). Yet even that version didn’t have film-maker editing on this level. Though if we’re swinging our video game cinematic dicks around, Final Fantasy VII doesn’t have a _Man Staring at the Sea_. + +A commonly heard refrain about Japanese Role-Playing Games is the ol’ “dude. Just play it for like 10 hours and then it gets really good”. Not only have you never heard anyone utter this about Final Fantasy VII, you’ve probably heard the reverse. “Yeah it’s _real_ good for the first 3/5/8 hours (varies with how truthful they are about the size of the Midgar section, and whether they admit to playing it with certain settings on), and then it gets kinda boring” . This says a lot about people’s perception of both the genre, and Final Fantasy VII specifically. What I mean is: Due to the complexity of these games, they slowly add mechanics over the course of some 10 hours, and then, when you finally see the whole breadth, you either have Stockholm Syndrome, or you genuinely agree with the designers that this is a good idea. Final Fantasy VII rammed a 10-hour, $80 million symphony of 20-year-old Scotch and fresh new blowjobs, performed by the entire AKB48 ensemble into the roof of its mouth, and blew its own head off. + +And then it got good, dude. + +Is trying to keep a lid on how much you like a subject a common occurrence? Is it universal for everyone to have the equivalent of what some people call “hiding your power level” or “hiding your crazy”? Final Fantasy VII is really trying to “hide its crazy” with Midgar. Its crazy, is that this is actually a traditional Japanese Role-Playing Game with all the systems and mechanics that that entails. Parlour tricking you with set-piece dungeons like Wall Market and a gripping and fantastically well-paced and brilliantly told narrative, is really only to keep you around until it feels comfortable showing its true self, and praying you don’t run away screaming. Which a lot of people did. + +Playing Final Fantasy VII this time felt strangely like playing it for the first time. I recalled many moments, and yet so many mandatory sequences seemed completely new to me. Numerous times I had to question how I ever finished it when I was… 9? That can’t be right. Did I play it in 2001? That seems too late. Who _am_ I? Did every unit of time once exist in a much, much smaller period, so that a playthrough of Final Fantasy VII could somehow occupy the mental space of what would today be an entire decade? Describing what I once knew or observed as something so trivial as nostalgia seems like a gargantuan disrespect to whatever it is to be a child. How could I possibly be in a position to reflect on what Final Fantasy VII felt like to play for a kid that barely spoke and read English? How could that kid possibly appreciate the richness and generosity of this work? He played it alone. No one else thought Cloud Strife looked fucking cool. He didn’t even know the game was from Japan. Did he? + +Man, I used to be a genius. I _must_ have been. This game is fantastic. Every single battle is a joy. Somehow the Final Fantasy series jumped from the Super Nintendo to the Sony Playstation and became far more kinetic, faster, more responsive, and didn’t lose any complexity. The throwaway random battles are deliciously balanced between relaxing usages of the game’s systems, and constant pick-me-ups of magical skirmishes with that banging little battle theme. The boss fights all mow down whatever is in front of them, just to tell me that _this_ fight, _this_ time, will be even cooler. _Those Who Fight Further_ has never been topped. Sorry _IV_ fans. I genuinely apologise, _V_ fans. Final Fantasy VII has the best battle music, regular _OR_ boss. + +The previously mentioned generosity is the key. Another not-uncommon criticism of Japanese Role-Playing Games is that they are disrespectful of the player’s time: The result of random battles is a foregone conclusion, and being underpowered for a mandatory battle, necessitates that you run in circles, fighting more and more lighting slugs and unicycle horse robots, until you feel ready for the next challenge. This, my imaginary reader, is the wrong perspective. It is wrong, because it misunderstands the genre. It misunderstands the genre, because it didn’t come to have a good time. It came to the party to have a bad time, and argue and to leave in huff. This would only be a strawman argument if it wasn’t so god damn true. + +It’s rather simple really. As previously described, every encounter in Final Fantasy VII feels good. The music is blood-pumping. As you travel further away from Midgar, new mechanics are added, old spells become more powerful. The observant player will start to accumulate spells _from_ the monsters. If you fight the monsters that appear in front of you, and travel at a leisurely pace, you will be well-equipped, though not too well-equipped, to take on any boss monster, and with a bit of tenacity, even some optional one you probably aren’t really ready for. You won't, however, have access to the entire possible arsenal of Final Fantasy VII. It is vast, and it is world-destroying, and the designers aren’t keeping it from you out of malice. They are rewarding it, to those who are having too good of a time. See if you were a little older than I was back when Final Fantasy VII was released, you still might not have had access to too many other games. The notion of a _backlog_ of unplayed games didn’t exist yet. So if Final Fantasy VII was blowing your mind, and you just couldn’t get enough, you would keep playing. The optional content was there, and it was plentiful. And as you kept on playing, more and more content would get unlocked. Powerful additions that would help you with defeating superior monsters that existed where only a few people were looking. The game was saying “Hey man, great that you’re having a good time. Uh… I mean, there really isn’t any more story. Hmm. Would you like an insanely powerful summoning spell? Oh, you just like filling up all the bars? Uh, well I guess once you’re done, you can have a magical jelly bean that contains all the magical jelly beans at the same time? Jeez. Well, as long as you’re having fun.” + +Final Fantasy VII is the old lady you used to visit. She had lived through the war (any war). She could tell you some stories. Hopefully she did. You would watch TV at her house and she’d give you cookies. You kept coming over and she honestly, really appreciated the company. diff --git a/drafts/Game Design of the Floating Point World.md b/drafts/Game Design of the Floating Point World.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..127f22a --- /dev/null +++ b/drafts/Game Design of the Floating Point World.md @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +

+ + +A few years ago I read some game designer (Jonathan Blow maybe?) note that his favorite recent game was Assassin’s Creed (the first one?) because it utilized 3d space so well. That is, the game wasn’t just represented with 3d graphics, it actually took place in 3d space: Navigation, exploration, sometimes combat. It was a cool thing to observe, because until then, I had just thought that 2d was 2d and 3d was 3d. + +What then, was the point of 3d, if the gameplay didn’t actually use 3d space? What did we gain when we went from SNES to N64? + +I think the answer is a combination of the extra dimension and new hardware. + +When programmers have to think about how to represent a game world in code, they have to imagine how numbers can represent details. Until then 3d games, things usually existed in a grid. The pixel art makes this obvious, and the fluid nature of games like Mario, makes you forget that everything is placed on this grid. Yet the controls gave it away. Pressing really fast, I might be able to move a character 1 pixel, but I could never move half a pixel. + +This changed when games became 3d. The game worlds were no longer placed on an easily distinguishable grid. The architecture might have been simple in the beginning, it was already more organic than had ever been possible before. + +The analog stick of the Nintendo 64 was a great way to more easily navigate these worlds. By tilting the stick in various arcs and degrees, I could circle around targetted monsters in Ocarina of Time, like in the Wolfos battle pictured above. The Z-targetting system allowed smooth movement where I could navigate relatively easily navigate the non-grid-based terrain, while still remain focused on an enemy. + +It’s really quite impressive that so many games of that time successfully handled not only going from grid-based 2d games to more free-form worlds, but that they occasionally managed to successfully include fun, vertical gameplay simultaneously, is really something. diff --git a/drafts/Godfucker (Stella Glow).md b/drafts/Godfucker (Stella Glow).md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4e02234 --- /dev/null +++ b/drafts/Godfucker (Stella Glow).md @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ + + +If you play your cards right in Stella Glow, (metaphorically speaking, (it isn't THAT uninspired)) you get to _bang_ __God__. (again metaphorically (but like, barely)). It's actually a very elegant merging of themes, plot, and gameplay. It's also just as crude as it sounds. This is why I play games. This is why Japan wins. + +The guiltiest of pleasures. Someone came to the conclusion that dating sim and tactical jrpg mesh well together. Full disclosure: if you stacked all the shits I give about dating sims, you'd have a very thin film. Still, Imageepoch made the 7th Dragon games, and the third one (which in some shape or form was also a Sega game (I should really ask someone)) is one of the best, most unapologetic JRPGs ever. Which brings me to the first guilty pleasure: Tactical JRPGs, no matter how stupid. And 7th Dragon III was pretty damn stupid. You could fuck everyone. Like… literally. Except it wasn't literal, but they sure didn't try to hide it very well. Stella Glow is definitely stupid in the same way. Alto, the token eunic-like MC, stabs all the girls with his thick dagger, to make them overcome emotional trauma, and learn badass new spells. Also, they sing. "Volt Shower" is really catchy. I definitely hoped Stella Glow would recreate the 900 mph turn-based combat of 7D, but marinated in a sweet, sweet tactics sauce. As you've already guessed, nope. It's slow and trudging. In fact, it was so slow, I threw the game aside after the first few battles. "Fortunately" I had a disagreement with my former boss and so we came to an agreement that I would no longer need a salary. This kind of deal gives you a bunch of spare time, and since my mind had turned to gruel, I picked up Stella Glow where I had left off. + +Guilty pleasure number deux is of course that this is trash anime. It's a harem anime with all the bells and whistles, and girls of ages that make Americans squirm (that sentence says very little. The infantilization of Americans has reached a level where I saw people feel uncomfortable about a 21 year old being sexualised). The belly-flashing Popo is 15, so… don't fuck her? I mean she's a cartoon, but hands off mister, hands off. + +I mentioned I don't care about dating sims. But Sir, you say, how come you're playing this dumpster-tier anime garbage then? Surely your cravings for fast-paced tactical JRPGs don't outweigh the tediousness of managing dating action points? Don't worry, lad, I reply. I hacked the game to shit. Which is also why I could avoid the crime against humanity that is the English dub. I can't really say whether Stella Glow is too easy or hard. YouHacking the game gives me access to a lot of mechanically interesting spells and abilities before they should be there. It makes the game easier, but definitely also more interesting. I think it might be the better approach. + +To be fair, the writing isn't actually bad. While the girls are definitely lusting over Alto in a very trope-like manner, their individual stories make them fully realised characters. The late-to-the-party character Mortimer is quite a sad character, and very engaging. The fact that she has a moogle-like speech impediment is both cute and annoying. To be fully fair, the villains' motivations and behaviour are stupid as shit. I gave it a pass, since I wasn't really expecting any better. + +This is why I don't write reviews. There's nothing to recommend. Stella Glow is a perfectly good way to waste time. You are going to be wasting time anyway. Don't use social media. Do not-fuck an anime witch! (The girls are witches. It's a story thing. I'm not calling them witches as a pejorative). The mechanic of characters being adjacent to each other has potential. The bar that increases with damage dealt and kills, until you can use your conductor, Alto, to "activate" a witch, provides strategy. Theoretically, any game could be the greatest game ever made. With Stella Glow, it's just so easy to pinpoint HOW it could have been the GOAT, that being sad is really unavoidable. It is what it is, and that's fun too. + +Towards the end, the dating aspect rears its silly head again. The concept of emotionally investing yourself in a relationship with a decision represented by a cute anime girl makes a lot of sense. That of course makes it too bad that the dating scenes didn't hook me. The girls are written to love you from the start, so there's hardly a relationship to build. It's a lot more fun hanging with the male characters. The game's individual character endings you can view if you max a relationship, are the exact opposite. Here all the girls get either cute, sexy, or emotionally interesting endings. Lisette's kinda all three. Nonoka's is just some implied "paizuri". I'm a man of culture, so I appreciated that. Popo's is better than her character is normally written, and Mort's is for those who like the Ayanami Rei type in a sukumizu (again, culture). The guys all just get silly, stupid endings. + +The "true ending" final boss is a real fun battle, but strikes me as balancing on a knife's edge between fun challenge and super annoyingly difficult. It didn't have to be this close. If the game was smoother, faster, more springy, and didn't have little unnecessary waits in every action and animation, battles could feel fast-paced, even though they're turn-based. Have you ever seen a clip of Magnus Carlsen playing Chess? Tactical games should strive to let you play like that, even though you're a little stupid, and Magnus is a very bright Norwegian fellow. So I end back at the "why couldn't the creators of 7th Dragon (3?) create a tactical JRPG as fast as 7th Dragon (?)?". That would have gotten me just a little closer to feeling like Weeb Magnus Carlsen, instead of Sexy Anime Bingo. + +Stella Glow: Hack it, undub it, pick Lisette's ending. + diff --git a/drafts/Greedy Hardware, Neat Game Design - Crystal Chronicles & Diablo III.md b/drafts/Greedy Hardware, Neat Game Design - Crystal Chronicles & Diablo III.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..fb24f89 --- /dev/null +++ b/drafts/Greedy Hardware, Neat Game Design - Crystal Chronicles & Diablo III.md @@ -0,0 +1,26 @@ +

+ + +I didn’t really read any gaming magazines’ commentary on the GameCube when first unveiled, but I imagine it can’t have been far from what I thought at the time + +>“Oh cool, you can connect your handheld to it, everyone gets their own screen then. Wait, I NEED four GBAs and four cables to even play the new Zelda game?” + +And then I didn’t play the new Zelda game. + +Then came Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, a game with its own little backstory on how it even came to be on a Nintendo console, which is kinda interesting, but what’s more interesting, is that it was a pretty fun game, with some beautiful graphics, super unique music, and a couple of great/annoying mechanics. You had to work together in multiplayer to carry around a chalice to keep the poison air at bay. + +As a pure hand ‘n slash kinda game, the GBA connectivity seemed like a prime example of corporate greed that would only result in fewer people actually playing the game, because who the fuck could afford all that shit. + +Then years later, I was in this sweet little café-bar in Kyoto, Café La Siesta, and played Puyo Puyo while waiting for my meal. It occured to me that I’d love to have my own bar, and in this bar, I would want a GameCube with four GBAs connected to, so that patrons could play Crystal Chronicles while drinking. So I went to various second-hand electronics stores and bought old GBAs and cables, and later got a copy of Crystal Chronicles. + +Having finally assembled all the little pieces needed to even fully enjoy the experience, I realize that the hardware setup is the optimal solution, since it was actually available. See, since everyone had a second screen available for their personal use, individual players could manage their spells and inventory without breaking the flow of the game. I love this, and the benefit is immediately apparent. + +But just to underline how perfect a solution this was, lets look at Diablo III for the Playstation 4. This is pretty much the same game, but without the chalice-system and without personal screens. + +Diablo III is a great game, also on the PS4, but the need for a second screen is immediately obvious, as me and my friends had to completely destroy the flow of the game every time someone had to fiddle with their character. + +Even the chalice-system is vindicated, since the couch-experience almost demands that players have a reason to interact with each other both on-screen and on the couch. Very little inter-player interaction seems part of the normal Diablo experience. This never seemed like a problem before. It was still a lot of fun mowing down monsters with friends, every player on their own computer, but still gathered in the same room. But on the couch, the game quickly yearned for a reason for players to work together/fuck over each other. I got the feeling that I was trying to play Diablo III, while 3 other guys were crowding my personal screen. With the chalice-system, we had to communicate and coordinate, quickly depending on each other, cursing the weakest link and desperately trying to work as a team. + +Sometimes game hardware seems forced and clunky, introduced only to increase profit, but any development that is based on giving designers more options, can definitely become of great benefit for the players, if the designers are able to communicate these advantages. + +Clearly no one managed to do this for Crystal Chronicles, and it is indeed sad that no one remade this game for the Wii U with the second-screen controller interface-conundrum solved with 3DS’s. It’s all too bad really, but it taught me to keep my mind open for later times when Nintendo added weird hardware gimmicks to their new consoles. diff --git a/drafts/Grindstone.md b/drafts/Grindstone.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..47902bc --- /dev/null +++ b/drafts/Grindstone.md @@ -0,0 +1,28 @@ +Grindstone + +Sitting in a hostel in Kyoto around a week or so before the Tohoku earthquake I was rewatching a video on Vimeo of some people from _Capybara Games_ discussing their new game _Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP_. What was this game? How did it play? It looked so unique, the music was a bit scary but also very enthralling. It was gonna be playable on a device that was the actual future in your hand, but in the actual present. I was in a city representing the very idea of culture, in a land all about mixing fantastic aesthetics with the most interesting, newest technology, and porn was literally everywhere. That last part wasn’t really related, it just surprised me how ubiquitous the stuff was. It was incredible to hear these guys talk about Sworcery. They were really honest about what they were doing, yet were also really trying not to give it all away. It was about a month from release at the time I was watching the video, and the hype got to me so bad. Since then, so many devs have unapologetically ripped off the _Superbrothers_ twig-pixel-man style. Not a lot have tried to be what the game was. Mobile gaming wasn’t what it was today. It wasn’t really anything yet. It was ripe for doing whatever the fuck you wanted. _Capy_ sure did. Back when Lost was airing its second or third season, I thought it was really interesting that the number of firearms on the show was super scarce. Every gun mattered, and became not just a tool for shootouts, but a symbol of power. Hell, every bullet mattered. Being a super dull person, I thought “what if games did that”. Sworcery sorta did something like that with its battles. What are there, seven or eight mandatory battles? They’re simplistic, and a bit repetitive, but feel great, and narratively they carry a lot of weight. Also, you grow more and more sick and frail as the game progresses. It’s inverse Zelda. Honestly I did kinda want Sworcery to be a lot more. A lot more content. A lot more Zelda too. My hype prevented me from being disappointed, but I definitely was. I now realize I was a moron. Sworcery was so much better and so much more than we’ve gotten since then. It might have been the best that mobile games have ever been (in certain aspects). To not have been as hyped, but also to more easily have understood what Sworcery was, I should a) definitely have finished season two of Twin Peaks, and b) believed the _Capy_ chaps when they were trying to tell us what the game was and wasn’t, in that video. Even when you fundamentally, apparently, misunderstand what someone is telling you, that doesn’t mean you don’t appreciate the conversation. Learning about and playing Sworcery was having a conversation while drunk, in a language you speak poorly, about a topic you know nothing about. There was a lot to talk about. A lot about what became and what didn’t + +Around 2010 I played too much _Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes_. I had moved across the country (it’s a small country, it wasn’t really that far) and with every train trip back and forth, my DS became more and more permanently attached to my hands. A year later I moved to another city, with my hands now perfectly resembling an iPod-white clam-shell gaming device developed in Kyoto, city of vegan chiptune restaurants and ancient, overcrowded shrines and temples. I wouldn’t know that last part until a year later. My newly mutated hands were perfect for playing _Clash_. The following experience has since then become my go-to way of telling if I’ve played a game too much (the hands eventually returned to their original shape). Playing a game that much, is so dissonant with my life anno 2020, that I’m having a hard time even recalling how I did it. How did I (kinda) attend uni, (kinda) maintain a social life, and (absolutely) devour that game? After waterboarding myself in hot, steaming pixel art, and ingenious game design for over a week, I got sick and had a wild ride of a fever. Not unlike when I over-indulged in Puzzle Bubble a couple of years before, in high school, all I could see were the patterns of lining up soldiers to activate powerful arcane units, and stacking magically appearing, and overlapping fences. The fever exaggerated this effect: I would imagine complex situations, units standing in numerous positions, and contemplate how to react, and counteract with every possible action. It made my head spin, so I had to sleep, but in my fevered dreams, the colors and patterns were still those of elfs and little knights fusing and chaining into more powerful constellations. The fever broke, I woke up. I abandoned the game. A few years later a buddy of mine discovered _Clash_ and so I went back in, controlled myself, and finished the story. Many wonderful multiplayer skirmishes followed. There was something so wrong with this game. The story and dialogue were too good for what was almost a tie-in game, and the game design was the kind of simplicity that makes me go “surely this has been done already” ( and subsequently, “smack my bitch up, somehow, it’s a first!”). Other examples in that category of ought-to-have-been-done-but-have-not are _Threes_, _Baba is You_, and _Petal Crash_. Fortunately, _Capybara Games_ used to be quite active in talks and presentations, so they’ve told us how much time they laboured over _Clash_, back when it was still called Little Big Battle, how it used to be real-time, and how they worked with Ubisoft to make it a Might & Magic game. If you spent a few seconds thinking about it, of course the game didn’t come about on it’s own, and of course no one had done this before. Even with Puzzle Quest before it (and Gyromancer releasing a month before, but that’s hardly time to act on inspiration), _Clash_ was definitely a new, and wondrous type of experience. Something to treasure and put on a pedestal. To go back to and think “how”, and “more please”. It’s a classic case of more than the sum of its parts. Sure it’s a strategic puzzle game with RPG elements and an engrossing narrative. It’s just a few years before also having unnecessary crafting and a superfluous skill tree. _Clash_ is so finely balanced (and even a bit more balanced in its HD re-release) and fine-tuned for a maximum amount of good feelings. It’s making a new friend, messaging said friend, who immediately sees and replies, wittingly, earnestly, and thoughtfully. It works in singleplayer, it works in multiplayer. One mode does not feel like it came before the other. It is what puzzle games could strive for, and what they never really were again after that. I suppose much of what I praise _Clash_ for, became the good parts of all those deck building games. Except _Clash_ wasn’t dependent on some careless design idea like “your units are actually cards”. Its units were physical parts of the world, and despite them waiting around like good little JRPG teen warrior wizards, there is a completeness to the way all the elements of _Clash_ fits together, that doesn’t need some cheap abstraction like “you’re building a deck of cards”. The DS cartridge is the full experience (arguably the Steam release you ought to buy when you’re done reading this is the full release plus). + +Ten years after hallucinating my way through a fever, matching bears and pixies into treants and druids, I found myself in some seaside town of Poland. Between endless time-bartering sessions, using a currency I wasn’t in possession of, selling stuff I wasn’t in control of, to people who must have known the pointlessness of the entire exercise, I escaped into my phone. If your hair isn’t still dripping wet from placenta juice, you remember that phones used to be shit. They’re incredible now, and testaments to incredible wasted potential. A device of such magnitudes of things never achieved, is the perfect platform for a game as vapid and full of nothingness as _Legends of Solgard_. This game is the unwanted, accidental, and abandoned hate-spawn between a patron eldritch horror of uninspiredness, and a man who masturbates to spreadsheets. I played it ferociously, every break I got, for three days. I then threw it away, like a man who realises mid-bite in a MacDonald’s that he is eating a patty of burned cardboard semen. Coincidentally, I was once again ill (planes are disease incubators). This time I didn’t have a fever, but it didn’t exactly improve the situation either. It’s incredibly boring to try and recap what has happened in video games between _Clash_ and _Solgard_ (that was my first draft). Suffice to say, _Solgard_ is the final scene of There will be Blood. It’s a huge, magnificent, empty mansion where an insane old, white guy lives. Traditionally, a game can’t commit acts of violence, but it’s likely that someone at King.com once beat a man to death with a bowling pin, carving his skull open like a ripe watermelon. Metaphorically of course. Or whatever. It’s a flowery way of saying that _Solgard_ takes something beautiful, and though it makes it absolutely shittingly addictive, it also twists and breaks _Clash_ into a symbol of its own opposite. It is the uruk-hai to the Elves. I could go on for pretty long, taking a massive dump on _Solgard_, and anyone involved. This is crazy behaviour for a multiplicity of reasons. There’s really no reason to care. The game objectively plays more pleasantly than _Clash_. And finally, while I haven’t been inside the satanic quantum gravitational reactor core that spawned this game, in a previous life, I did stare into a similar Ba’al Engine. Clearly people work on something like this for many reasons, and they are just normal humans, and we can’t all create ingeniously designed toys that reinvent what a genre can be. And while I certainly didn’t worship the Dark Lord of that Machine in my former life, I was also not not part of the whole... coven, as peripheral as that involvement might have been. And even though I’d brought my Switch to Poland, loaded with that absolutely oversized demo of _Dragon Quest XI_, I mostly played _Solgard_ after frying my brain all day long. It felt good. Activating the familiar combinations, getting hits in, summoning reinforcements. It retained the best parts of _Clash_ to such an extent that playing a game that was in most regards far better, became a herculean mental Labour. The real tragedy of _Solgard_ is the one concerning what this game might have been. This entire text is evidence that few others would have appreciated a good _Solgard_ as much as me, and I certainly did try to extract those specific areas from it, trying with all my mind to simply ignore the parts I knew were actually there to exploit the players. Also, for some reason it’s perfectly acceptable to take a break by pulling out your phone and playing something one-handed. Apparently it gives off the same vibes as texting, and for that I appreciate _Solgard_ for allowing moments of respite, which really were needed. _Solgard_ isn’t the only trajectory for how puzzle games could evolve from _Clash_. With any luck, some years from now, perhaps a more human-friendly ideology develop in mobile games. Like all things in that sphere, it’ll be driven by greed, but in field as inconsequential as mobile games, if the ends and means are just, I can’t say I care if the motive is synonymous with a villain from Fullmetal Alchemist. + +When I was 4-5 years old, I'd watch my older brother play DooM on some ("Donatello…") DOS machine. It ran Norton Commander, and was mesmerizing. Why did he have a computer in his room? A year later we moved, didn't bring it, and from then on newer computers were in the living room or basement. The next day I would draw the level overlay maps and the grown-ups would comment and praise me. DooM is cool. DooM is so insanely cool that even today, most games seem rudimentary next to its brutality. Shotgun-shell-meets-Zombieman is a crystallized moment of what feels fantastic in video games. Replaying it on Switch on a hundred billion inch TV with big-butt wall-mounted Bowers & Wilkins speakers, and an oversized amplifier, I realize, perhaps a bit late, that DooM is exceedingly violent. In fact, I would have certain qualms playing it in front of MY currently 4 years old son. My dad’s explanation of the situation in 1993/94 was as follows: + +“Hah. I didn’t give two shits what you boys played.” + +My father is the greatest man who ever lived. Not because of that, but it didn’t detract any points either. Despite these thoughts of the influence of violence, I sure did play a lot of _Grindstone_ in front of the boy. The enemies are clearly sentient, occasionally scared, and they sure do get absolutely ripped apart. One unfortunate is even, post-battle, pummelled apart. He can be kissed out of existence, but I didn’t realize this the first time (or I really wanted to beat the snot out of him). What to translate the enemy names into was quite the challenge as well. Some are called Jerks, which is just such a fantastically chosen word. It’s sort of storytelling. I imagine it’s the insane player character who calls them jerks. It’s sort of a meta-term, in that it’s probably something a lot of players would use to refer to these enemies as anyway, since they sure are a bunch of jerkwads. It even solves a second storytelling issue, as any in-universe lore term would be sort of cringy to say aloud, and the _Capy_ lads probably didn’t want to go down that particularly nerdy alley, in a game about intelligently executing a mountainous genocide. Problem with “jerk” is how English or rather American it is. It’s a pejorative, but a (I believe) mild one. All the same, it’s really punchy (pully? (JERKY?)), on par with “fuck”, but, as noted, not as offensive. Finding a word in my native language that fits so nicely into that space is basically impossible. The literal translation misses some of the connotations and isn’t succinct at all. Anything that is pleasant to say, is definitely more offensive, and though I don’t really care which words my boy goes around say, it does get a teensy bit annoying when he finds a particular love for that one massively offensive word around dinner time. Some of the thoughts that helped shape _Grindstone_ were apparently already there at the time of _Clash_, but as far as puzzle games go, _Grindstone_ is almost a different genre. No more playing with a buddy, it’s a seemingly endless cavalcade of butchery and gem-collecting, with a control setup originally designed specifically for those ever so disappointing touchscreen devices. On the Switch they developed a new control scheme that is, almost by definition, a tad forced. It works really well though, but is one of those traits that tell us what happened in gaaaaaming in the last couple of years. _Grindstone_ has no story, no conversations, no exploration. You ascend a vertical map of nodes representing levels, use your loot to buy or restock equipment, and that’s it. I can’t deny that from a certain point of view, it’s a purer experience than having experience points, and an expansive narrative. Being developed (in utmost secrecy) for a smartphone before a console, probably had this influence. Maybe not. I still haven’t played _Capy_’s previous work, Below. Does it have a skill tree? It is a roguelike, so they can’t exactly claim they are free from a Zeitgeist of the Boring (though Below was in development for so long that maybe they started before it was passé). Maybe _Grindstone_ would have been the exact same game had it initially released on PS4 or Switch. I’m guessing no. _Capy_ has marinated their little hatred simulator in smartphone sauce and ginger. What probably saved _Grindstone_ from being an actual smartphone game (I say that with all the implied vitriol you can imagine), was that some corporation was willing to let them release it on their premium game service, and so there are no vestigials of what normally comes from being a matching game on mobile. It’s kind of beautiful. The exact design that makes these games excellent money machines for assholes, is what makes the game an experience that’s been reduced to its purest essence. That vertical level selection map is so essentially that of a mobile game, that it's interesting to give it some extra thought. So much game design was created for console and computer experiences, but in the last ten years, new thoughts are developed for mobile. Not many of these are brought back to console though, but here we see this degenerated version of the _Super Mario Bros. 3_ map that was designed to make mobile games as casual an experience as possible being brought back completely unashamed. Calling it pure a few sentences ago was a way of really trying to see the bright side of the way games are on mobile. A way of trying to not be the guy who says “mobile games aren’t real games”. _Grindstone_ definitely is a real game. It’s great breadth and depth. It’s not trying to nickel and dime anyone. Yet for all my praise, I haven’t finished _Grindstone_. I don’t think I’m even close to doing all the levels. That vertical map is a tool. It’s a tool to present countless, slightly changing levels in some other way than a simple list of names. It tells you how much you get for free, and is just involved enough to feel like a game without making you feel like a neeeerd. The vertical map turns out to have a different effect when the game is no longer an exercise in secretly exploiting people. Even though it doesn’t look like a to-do list, it does feel like the prettiest to-do list ever. At least after some eighty levels or so. From the classic console game perspective, without a compelling meta game or narrative of any sort, the map serves no point, and from the mobile phone direction, if the game isn’t trying to enthrall you to eventually get something out of you, trying to constantly remind you how much you’re getting for your buck, becomes more of a weight on your shoulders than feature. When I played Baldur’s Gate 2 I accidentally did this to myself by accepting and not completing an indian train carriage worth of subquests. So yeah, I don’t really feel done with _Grindstone_, but I kinda just want it to be some twenty or thirty fantastic levels, and then a random slash infinite mode. + +My god. Did I get filtered by a god. Damn. _Filthy_. __Casual__ game, for being too abundant? + +It sure is an interesting evolution to see what psychotic, money-lovin’ dick-barf-drinkers in San Francisco (or wherever these kinds of mobile games were first invented) can make real, but the world map/level selection in SMB3 on a darned NES was apparently still the best choice for a good game experience, and _Clash_ adding a bit of story on top might have diluted the purity of the game a bit, but it didn’t hurt the experience either. Doesn’t make _Grindstone_ a bad game at all though, it might just be beneficial to consider where we’re drawing our influences from, and whether those influences are worth assimilating into the medium in general. + +_Grindstone_ is drawn in _Capy_’s “episode of Adventure Time where PB has soon-to-rupture gangrene” artstyle, similar to the cartoons for _Super Time Force_. It is clean, legible to an extreme degree, kinda nauseating, and probably the best choice for today’s divine displays of very small pixels, if you’re doing a 2D game, have talent, a budget, and a good sense of design. All that said, I don’t really like it. Gory stuff is fun and cathartic, but I don’t really like the “flat-shaded, lumpy characters with goofy faces”. It feels like something I often see in recent cartoons. That’s a cop out explanation. I could just say I find it ugly, plain, and impersonal. I have to admit that because I’m about to say I wish the game was drawn with the same great low-resolution pixel characters that _Clash_ or Timeforce were drawn in, and is there really anything more unoriginal than doing low resolution pixel art in 2020 (roguelike with deckbuilding?)? That might be the most nit-picky I get in this text, but I’m sure someone made a chart that shows how nit-picking is both proportional and inversely proportional to the quality of something. + +The most basic, build-it-with-legos-paper-prototype version of _Grindstone_ is of the player painting a line of homicidal intent in a specific type of “Creep of Color”. Kill enough CoCs, and you can kill a Jerk. This reduces your Kill Count, but you can switch to a different ethnicity, keep the chain going and attempt to increase the Kill Count again to kill another Jerk, and so on. It is Words with Friends, where no one is your friend, there is no talking, in a game that’s actually fun, designed by video game auteurs, simplified enough for common schlubs, but worthy of the time from the truly sophisticated connoisseur, who only plays video games with a glass of 16 year old, single cask Laphroaig next to them. + +Doing well in _Grindstone_ is a prerequisite for getting any dopamines from the experience. The minimal interaction isn't enough to get any feel-good vibes, but it tickles you to try a little harder. No matter how plain that observation is, don't forget that mobiles strive to make sure that you either don't need to do well, or hardly even need to interact in order to feel like a champ. It's you who is observing the patterns in _Grindstone_, you who executes the plan. The short chains might come cheaply, but planning a route through a sea of creeps and executing upon it isn't. That feeling is earned. The inherent benefit of doing well in a game like this, is that you also feel a little bit smart for seeing hidden patterns in the chaos. Once you’re done with _Grindstone_, the next game to play isn’t _Clash_ or god forbid, _Bejeweled_. It’s _Into the Breach_. The similarities could fill a second text this size, but one great, and similar, design choice I’d like to point out, is that both games are very deterministic, save for one detail: In Breach, the buildings you so desperately try to defend might occasionally repel damage with a randomly activating shield. You can’t count on it, but it’s wonderful when it happens. In the same manner, bifurcating a Jerk will catapult a gem stone onto the playing field, crushing a random Creep. The gem is valuable afterwards, and is another object that’ll let you switch which ethnicity you’re murdering, so the random location it lands on is truly blessed. This trait of being widely deterministic, but then still showing random gestures of kindness is a great little mechanic. + +I left Kyoto on the 9th or 10th of March, 2011. Tokyo had been cool and overwhelming. I’d walked too much in the days I was there, to see too many sights. I’ve always wanted to go back to experience it far more leisurely. It’s doubtful I’ll get the time now. Fortunately, after ten intense days in Tokyo, I went to Kyoto and explored the city with just that attitude. I loved my days in the city. Loved them so much I changed my plans and came back later. A girl in my year at university had scored higher marks on her test and had gotten to go to a university in Kyoto for the semester abroad. I had to attend a university in Akita prefecture. That’s another story, but I’ll always think back with a certain amount of contempt on this girl who got one of the two spots for the university in Kyoto, and never even went. There are a lot of what-if moments in life, and to most of them I can say: I don’t care, I like what the end result was, despite a journey that I definitely didn’t appreciate at the time. There are moments I truly appreciated in the journey that didn’t include me living half a year in that ancient city, but, c’mon! It was gosh darned Kyoto. City of vegan chiptune restaurants! In comparison to Kyoto, Osaka seemed downright filthy. It probably wasn’t, my expectations had just become a bit skewed. The other hostels had been these cool, hip places where beautiful tourists from Canada and Sweden gathered, and shared their stories of fun stuff they’d done. The Osaka hotel was in a creepy highrise with unpleasant fluorescent lights and staff that didn’t quite wanna be there. I don’t remember meeting another guest. Later on I got a much better impression of Osaka and all it had to offer (Lemme tell you: Ame-mura. That was later though). We just got off on a rough start. Me and my travel buddy walked around the downtown area, scouting decent coffee shops. We went to Den Den Machi which was a bit of a disappointment. Walking home that evening I remember feeling so very tired and cold. We stopped at what I remember as a Chococro. Once again, I was sick. It would appear that trains are also disease incubators. It wasn’t gonna be fun getting back to the hotel with a fever going full force. My fevers are always really bad. Intense sweating, nightmares, feeling super cold while burning. The next day my buddy met up with a friend of ours. I think they went to the aquarium (I went a couple of years later. It was fantastic). On his way back to the hotel, he told me, he thought he might have gotten sick as well, since everything suddenly started shaking. At the same time, I was thinking my fever was a bit worse than usual. + +The next month was weird. At some point, me and my travel buddy arrived in Hiroshima. It’s a famous city, but I feel like more people ought to know about the modern day Hiroshima. It definitely has a unique flavour. Our hostel of choice was once again a nice place to stay. We ran into a couple of soldiers from our own country. They’d gotten a huge load of money from being in Afghanistan and decided to travel around Asia. Knowing how to read the Japanese characters for “okonomiyaki” and “nomihoudai” makes your travels in Japan a lot more fun, so I’d like to claim we made the rest of their journey a lot better, even though we only went out drinking with them that one evening. The next night I was sitting in the common area of the hostel. There was one other dude, an American. He told me his bosses were pissed at him. He wasn’t supposed to have left Tokyo, but he was pretty scared about what might happen in Fukushima. Apparently he was a (the?) lead tech guy on the new engine for a long running, world-renowned Japanese role-playing game franchise. There was a lot he couldn’t discuss, but he was pretty open about how tired he was of the corporate BS, and how he was sure they really wanted to fire him, but couldn’t. I’m pretty sure I recognized him in one of the promotion trailers they released a bit before the game the engine was developed for was actually released, a few years later. Part of why I liked that game was definitely what he had been part of. I didn’t meet him again after that. His personality was pretty off-putting that evening, but it was nice to have a conversation, while sober, in a language I had a good grasp of, about something I cared about. + diff --git a/drafts/Hartmann - A Dice Game.html b/drafts/Hartmann - A Dice Game.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7fec93a --- /dev/null +++ b/drafts/Hartmann - A Dice Game.html @@ -0,0 +1,23 @@ +

+

SETUP
+- 2-5 players and 1 six-sided die.
+- 6 different tokens. You need 2 * number-of-players of each type (4 for +2 players, 6 for 3 players).
+- each side of the die matches 1 kind of token.
+- the first player to get 1 of each token, wins

+

ON YOUR TURN YOU MAY EITHER:
+- roll the die and take a matching token
+OR
+- discard all tokens of three different types. You then gift one of +these tokens to another player.

+

You then then pass the die.

+

IF YOU GET 3 OF A SINGLE TYPE OF TOKEN, YOU MUST +EITHER:
+- discard 2 of that type of token and choose another player to receive +the third token.
+OR
+- discard all 3 of the token AND gift 1 token of a different kind to +another player.
+- as you can imagine, this can create a chain reaction.

+

Does this game already exists by a different name? The simplicity +kinda surprises me, so I have a hard time believing I invented it.

diff --git a/drafts/Hartmann - A Dice Game.md b/drafts/Hartmann - A Dice Game.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..67f2251 --- /dev/null +++ b/drafts/Hartmann - A Dice Game.md @@ -0,0 +1,23 @@ + + + +__SETUP__ +\- 2-5 players and 1 six-sided die. +\- 6 different tokens. You need 2 * number-of-players of each type (4 for 2 players, 6 for 3 players). +\- each side of the die matches 1 kind of token. +\- the first player to get 1 of each token, wins + +__ON YOUR TURN YOU MAY EITHER:__ +\- roll the die and take a matching token +_OR_ +\- discard all tokens of three different types. You then gift one of these tokens to another player. + +You then then pass the die. + +__IF YOU GET 3 OF A SINGLE TYPE OF TOKEN, YOU MUST EITHER:__ +\- discard 2 of that type of token and choose another player to receive the third token. +_OR_ +\- discard all 3 of the token AND gift 1 token of a different kind to another player. +\- as you can imagine, this can create a chain reaction. + +Does this game already exists by a different name? The simplicity kinda surprises me, so I have a hard time believing I invented it. diff --git a/drafts/Interview: Oscar Rodriguez (7th Dragon III Code: VFD).md b/drafts/Interview: Oscar Rodriguez (7th Dragon III Code: VFD).md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8ab88d8 --- /dev/null +++ b/drafts/Interview: Oscar Rodriguez (7th Dragon III Code: VFD).md @@ -0,0 +1,118 @@ +


+ + +Over the years, my fond memories of playing 7th Dragon III Code: VFD (7D3) haven't faded one bit. It's a classic Japanese Role-Playing Game that makes the turn-based format so free of waiting times, that the combat almost feels real-time. I dare say it didn't receieve a lot of attention at the time of release. This release is an odd story. All you have to do is look at the title. Why only release the fourth game in the series (There were two PSP titles, respectively 7th Dragon 2020 and 7th Dragon 2020-II (7D2, 7D2II))? How come the original games were made by Imageepoch, while 7D3 was made by Sega? + +Fortunately Twitter exists for a little while longer and so I asked Oscar Rodriguez a series of questions. I've taken the time to rephrase the message exchange as an actual interview, both so that it's easier to read, and so that it isn't lost in the swirling void of social media. + +Oscar Rodrigues is a Japanese engineer that has worked at Sega, Google, and currently AMD. On 7D3 he worked as a graphics programmer. He was kind enough to answer all of my questions, and in a rather detailed sense. + +As he himself notes, he was not a designer on the game, nor is he affiliated with Sega anymore, so take these answers as representing his personal views, and enjoy. + +__SKETCHWHALE (S)__ + +Can I ask a you a few 7D3 questions? Maybe you can't answer these questions, but since it was a smaller team, maybe you have an idea. + +__OSCAR RODRIGUEZ (O)__ + +Hi, and sorry for the delayed response. New year vacation and everything. + +I'll try to answer your questions, but please understand that I was on the programming team, so I had little visibility over these issues. + +__S__ + +Was it a Sega game, or was it started by Imageepoch and then finished by Sega? + +__OR__ + +When I received the source code, there had been a non trivial amount of work already done, about 20%~30%. We were tasked with finishing the game. I don't know who made the original initial work, but they weren't involved in finishing it. For some of the game building tools, we didn't even get the source code, so I assume that the break with the previous development company wasn't really clean for whatever reason. Unfortunately I don't know much more than this, and this is merely my hypothesis. + +__S__ + +It's really interesting to get this perspective about the work that had been done before your team started working. The structure of corporate Japanese game development is a bit of a mystery to me, and it becomes no less puzzling when comparing the names of who worked on 7D1, 7D2, and 7D2II compared to 7D3. Of what I've played from 7D2, they look a lot like 7D3, but with a little more super diminutive art style. Was part of the development also in porting PSP-targeted code to the 3DS? + +__OR__ + +No. I only worked on VFD. I first played the PSP games because of the Hatsune Miku collabs, and I quite enjoyed the series. I was certainly thrilled when I learned I could work on VFD. + +_[NOTE: Hatsune Miku appears as a guest character in the two PSP titles]_ + +__S__ + +2. How did the design change when becoming a Sega game? + +__OR__ + +I wasn't involved in the game design, so I don't know much about this. However, all four 7th Dragon games were directed by the late Rieko Kodama, and as far as I know she was quite hands on with the game design, so I reckon not much might have changed with the devteam change. + +__S__ + +I wasn't aware that Rieko Kodama worked on the previous titles as well. I'd only noticed her name in association with 7D3. I must admit it saddens me a little that 7D3 didn't get more attention, considering the love that Skies of Arcadia still receives. I'm getting the impression that the game's development was split between a design team, that remained the same, and a programming team, that was switched. How does that description sound? + +_[NOTE: Rieko Kodama (1963-2022) was a Japanese game developer. Over her long career she famously worked as a producer on Skies of Arcadia, and as a director on Phantasy Star IV amongst many other games.]_ + +__OR__ + +To be completely honest, I'm not even completely sure if she was involved with the older games. She was quite knowledgeable about the game world, and VFD felt like it was "her game", so I assumed she came up with the whole series, but it's possible that she didn't... Not sure... As for how games are made, it depends on many factors, but usually you have the "developer", who makes the game, and the "publisher" who funds it and sells it. + +Sometimes the developer and publisher are the same company, but for most games this is not the case. Publishers like Sega have many more games that they want to make than games that they can make internally, so for most games they hire an external company to make it for them. + +When doing so, Sega often puts a producer and a director to make sure the game turns out how they want. I reckon that for VFD, Kodama-san and maybe Watari-san were involved with the first company, and for some reason they stopped working with that company and brought the game source code and everything else that they had so we could then finish making the game internally. But once again, these are all my educated guesses. I was not involved in these decisions, so I can't say for sure. + +__S__ + +Which games continue what made 7D3 special? Like, the super responsive combat or the interesting character type mechanics. + +__OR__ + +"Special" is subjective. + +I enjoyed working on this game because we had a small team, freedom to do things the way we wanted, and we worked very closely with the other teams. This is a dream case scenario in game development. One thing I can say is that, being the graphics programmer, I worked very closely with the art director and the art team, all of which were very talented, and we did some really cool things graphically that we had originally thought the 3DS wasn't able to do. The team itself, at least on the programming side, was built ad-hoc. Some of us had worked on other projects together, but it's not like it was an existing team that made lots of games. This is also the case for basically every game I worked on at Sega. + +__S__ + +"Cool things [...] originally thought the 3DS wasn't able to do." You've GOTTA elaborate on that. + +__OR__ + +Showing all 9 characters on the screen at the same time was something that we initially thought wasn't possible with the 3DS hardware. When I first got the code, at most we could show 4. I'm glad we were eventually able to get all 9 at 30fps. Also, what we were able to do with the hair dynamics was pretty cool for the 3DS. You have to look very closely to notice it though, but that was also a cool addition. Also, the full screen effects were far from trivial. These can really kill performance, but we found ways to do all the effects that the art team wanted to make and still hit 30fps. + +I particularly liked the color aberration effect. That required some cool tricks on the 3DS hardware. + +


+ +__S__ + +I'd describe 7D3 as a fast-paced JRPG. I get the impression that I'M hitting the enemies, and like the game never makes me wait for combat. Are you a fan of Japanese role-playing games yourself? Is there an older title that made you go "Yes! This is how it's done", and a newer title that makes you go "They've still got it!"? + +__OR__ + +I enjoy the genre, and I think the 7D games came out pretty well. I've played a few others. I particularly enjoyed the Mother series and the Mario RPGs. + +I'm not really the best person to answer what makes a game good, since once again, I'm a programmer, not a game designer. + +__S__ + +Attributing auteurship to games is a common practice that might not make sense. Who were the people that made this game special, and how can we follow that special sauce get made elsewhere? + +__OR__ + +I think that games with small teams with lots of autonomy get made with love, and tend to earn the hearts of many players. + +That's why I like indie/doujin games and make my own. + +__S__ + +7D3 really did seem to have a lot of autonomy. Something like the dating mechanic requires a lot of work to add, but gives the game a very personal aspect. It also impressed me that it wasn't removed in the western release. From social media it looks like you aren't working in games professionally anymore, but now that mention you make your own games, what are those? With your experience I imagine they are both very technically and design-wise competent. And made with a lot of love, hahah. + +__OR__ + +Yes, I make my own games, and I have a few on Steam and PlayStation Store. I hope I will be able to make millions out of it in the future :) + +_[NOTE: Oscar mentions that he likes to keep his professional and indie work separate, so I've omitted that part.]_ + +__S__ + +Thank you for answering all my questions! + +_[END NOTE: Oscar and I continued talking through private messages after this, and he told me more about how teams and game development was organized at Sega. As a software developer myself I found this immensely interesting, but it doesn't quite fit in the interview. It came from our talk about how Rieko Kodama actually was producer on all four 7th Dragon titles and I needed to understand more about what it means to be a producer in a Japanese game development context. Finally, he told me about his coolest experience at Sega: he had convinced the director (Kawabata-san (Kawabata-kantoku?)) to let Oscar sit in when the voice acting was done, and he got to hear Toyosaki Aki work. This was apparently an unforgettable experience, and I just thought it was a delightful little detail in this game's production. Toyosaki-san is a profilific voice actress, with roles too numerous to count. I know for her role as Hirasawa Yui in K-On! especially. In 7D3 she voiced the dangerously young Nagumo Mio, one of the main characters. Once again, thank you to Oscar Rodriguez for answering all my questions and my follow-up questions, and continuing to talk to me even afterwards. His professional online presence can be found at [https://twitter.com/rapapaing](https://twitter.com/rapapaing) in case you want to talk to him yourself, or perhaps ask him about his indie games. I think they're pretty cool, so let's hope he achieves success there as well.]_ diff --git a/drafts/Møgluder: The Rabbit Age.md b/drafts/Møgluder: The Rabbit Age.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..878b4b8 --- /dev/null +++ b/drafts/Møgluder: The Rabbit Age.md @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +

+ + +Finally got to participate in a physical game jam again: Nordic Game Jam 2022! My fourth game jam. + +Our group made a prequel for [_The Girl Who Kicked a Rabbit_](https://takunomi.space/the_girl_who_kicked_a_rabbit/), titled: + +[_Møgluder: The Rabbit Age_](https://jmaa.itch.io/the-rabbit-age) + +It's great. I hope you enjoy it. Below is our mockup: + +

diff --git a/drafts/Naruto Chess (Triangle Strategy).md b/drafts/Naruto Chess (Triangle Strategy).md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..98dde5f --- /dev/null +++ b/drafts/Naruto Chess (Triangle Strategy).md @@ -0,0 +1,21 @@ +


+ + +We saw every big game turn into a pseudo RPG. Gain skill points and currency representing a fraction of how much you've learned until you reach a threshold that says you are finally smarter (I sure dragged that one out). No longer could you just point and kill. Now you had to gain small arbitrary abilities through a bloody Directed Acyclic Graph. I get the upsides (on many levels). Yet seeing a potentially perfect action game like the _God of War_ pseudo-reboot bloat into a filthy overstuffed fowl of itself, I've decided that if a game doesn't commit to being an RPG, it really shouldn't even try. Honestly, it breaks a game on more levels that it provides the good stuff. + +Which way is more sad? When a real deal, nose-breaking, "no look, I'm a smart, adult" game like _God of War anno 2018_ adds a tasteless broth of gated progression and calls it an RPG, OR when a ostensibly full realised "dig out your charters and guide books, cause we're going in deep" RPG like _Mass Effect_ removes so much of the actual good stuff, that all that's left, is the pain of what could have been? + +That's a bit much. Uh. I'm saying _God of War_ is worse for adding too much, when it should have added nothing at all, while _Mass Effect_ is worse for removing too little. _Mass Effect_ did better in its sequel. I own _Mass Effect 3_ for… uhm… the Wii U. I never removed the plastic. I imagine it might be fantastic. + +These thoughts always degenerate into a landscape of genre definitions. When you remove the RPG from a tactical RPG, it's just a tactical. The overstated observation is that _Into the Breach_ is really a puzzle game. Some called it a faster, snappier _Advance Wars_, when really the dynamic duo took a huge game design spoon, and excavated all the filling from _Final Fantasy Tactics_, leaving only the perfectly roasted skin. Into the Breach is the Peking Duck of video games. + +Since the first trailers for _Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light_, I've been tied to the career of Tomoyo Asano. Indeed _Bravely Second_ is the perfect JRPG and no one realises. When Asano was revealed to be working on a game that appeared very reminiscent of _Tactics Ogre_ and _Final Fantasy Tactics A2_ (it's better than _Final Fantasy Tactics_ and you can't do a damn thing to change that) I gave an approving nod. Even though I'd left _Octopath Traveller_ after some 20 frustrating hours, it wasn't enough to dampen my card carrying gamer enthusiasm. Asano-tachi was gonna do this right. A common feature of games Asano puts his dirty mittens on, is the lovely little action point system. What starts as a way to simplify JRPGs and their mana system in _4 Heroes_, becomes the brilliant Brave/Default system in _Couragely Standing By; or, The Seinfeld Maneuver_. Its dampening in _Octopath_ was balanced by the occasionally splendid Break system. In _Trifold Stratosphere_ it serves to remove MP, add strategy in an indirect fashion, (but not necessarily to simplify like in _4 Heroes_), and be more elegant than MP. Fighting over action points, charges, or whatever the ephemeral representation of being able to do anything is called, is always just a little more interesting than chugging elixirs to regain mana. + +I've heard a certain loquacious ex-model turned YouTuber sing songs of how every Japanese game developer is enthralled with _Game of Thrones_. It was an easy observation with _Final Fantasy XVI_ (though to his credit, he said it before they showed it off), but the degree to which it shows in _Triangle Strategy_ is a bit much. It also doesn't succeed. I'm not gonna go into what made _A Game of Thrones_ such a good book, but foie gras'ing a video game's storytelling with anime-isms really doesn't do it any favours. I love anime, it's not that. I'm not even saying it's impossible to mix mid-tier anime with serious mediaeval, political drama. Just in this particular case it comes off as campy rather than novel. It's too bad. We saw another tactical RPG fall and fail when doing the overly generic anime storytelling in _Stella Glow_, but we also saw _Tactics Ogre_ succeed at tactical JRPG storytelling in the same year as the first _A Song of Ice and Fire_ book was released. The story isn't bad mind you, and the Japanese voice actors are good as always. Once again, I just can't help but think of what could have been. As of writing I'm about 20 hours in, around chapter 12 (of 21 I hear). Took the goody two shoes path (though narc'ing was decided in an anarcho-syndicalist commune ratifying my decision by a simple majority in the case of a purely internal affair). Some fun twist might still occur, but it won't make the previous score hours any better. I am not being polemic for the fun of it. We all probably know how it is, the better something is, the easier it is to see little details that ruin the experience. Which just means, we've got something good here, it's just not great. + +What IS great, is the user experience. That's right. You should probably just buy _Triangle Strategy_ for the user experience design. In this regard, it comes with less bull than any tactical JRPG ever before it. Not just less of the bad stuff. It's boiling over with the ever-so-hard-to-describe je ne sais quoi. That certain perfect amount of feedback in so many little pieces of code, that makes you feel like YOU swung a sword and landed that skull-cracking blow, when all you really did was to select attack and then execute. Waiting is never an issue. There's even plenty of toggles to speed it all up, and you know what? I never took my foot off the gas (that means you keep going, right? I can't drive), and it always felt great. It's important to note that this doesn't come for free. JRPG legend Hiroyuki Ito completely fell on his face in this regard with the recent _Dungeon Encounters_. That game is ONLY about the fights, and while the minimalist combat system is single perfect brushstroke, the implementation is a constant series of unnecessary waits, and attacks that lack weight. _Polygonal Planning_ kind of tactics games tend to have a little extra geometrical intrigue. Elevation plays a role, as well as whether line-of-sight is blocked. Who can attack whom, and of course when. The art is to make all this information (and a lot more) instantly and easily accessible, and clearly comprehensible. The game is never "Aquarius like attacking geminis on rainy days" obtuse, but this is still a complex enough game to marvel at its accessibility level. _Pyramid Ponzi_ even adds the chemistry-for-stupid-kids from _Breath of the Wild_. + +At this point it's banal to mention that the characters in _Octopath Traveller_ didn't interact enough. Asano & Friends definitely fixed that here, but they still haven't returned to the interesting character customizability (I'm mixing game design and narrative here, I know) of the _Bravely_ games (which was so lovingly nicked from _Final Fantasy V_). Instead we take 1 step towards the snappy, ability based combat of _Into the Breach_, and half a step sideways towards those previously discussed pseudo RPGs. _Tri-tri Think-thunk_ serves a kinda big roster of team members, some integral to the plot, a lot of them a cardboard anime personality. They come with a short list of potential abilities, and you then mix and match as you see fit or the mission recommends. This is really where we hit the pseudo RPG problem: there is no point to gaining levels from a design perspective. The characters do not deviate on their evolutionary path. You can choose which characters to first upgrade, unlocking the next set of abilities, but really, you just want them all, cause they're not necessarily better, just different. A meta gameplay system like this only slows down the fun when it's just a throttle on possibilities, and not a representation of a character's growing might. Add to that, that battles do not really evolve, but instead come with various location handicaps: your team is split into two or three, you can sacrifice innocents, you're surrounded, you're surrounding an enemy team, and so on. Being level 1 vs level 3 enemies, is the same as being level 18 and fighting level 21 enemies. When you get into a design situation like that, you should either cut all the RPG chunks, or put on your 5-dildo hat and cosplay a Beholder. This middle of the road shit is no good. + +I'm not sure how anybody is supposed to lift the burden of being a Square Enix tactical JRPG. They decided to try. _Three Parts Thinky Time_ carries too many elements to avoid comparison, and so it is pitted against its predecessors. No reason to dwell on how loadout in _Into the Breach_ compares to the job system of _Final Fantasy Tactics_. They're solving different problems. It also doesn't strike me as unfair to arrange a tactical JRPG cockfight. What _Trinity Stratego_ does well, it does so well that it's gonna be a pain to go back and play those that came before it. And yet I'll pull through and like all grubby, grimy gamers with a soul and an IQ above sea level, I'll think about how _Final fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift_ managed to combine the job system of _Final Fantasy V_ with _Final Fantasy IX_'s weapon ability system, and have the worst title of any game ever. + diff --git a/drafts/Nyoki Nyoki Stream.md b/drafts/Nyoki Nyoki Stream.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..bab0afb --- /dev/null +++ b/drafts/Nyoki Nyoki Stream.md @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ + + +(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlX9vqyNuH8) + +A great to show that I’m extremely out of touch, is by exposing my lack of knowledge of game streaming. + +Whatever. I just discovered gaming youtube, a sub-youtube for game streaming, and with it found this stream of (and correct me if I’m wrong) a general streamer and a pro puyo puyo player, battling each other in the new Nyoki Nyoki. It’s great stuff. + +I absolutely love Puyo Puyo, and Nyoki Nyoki looks great as well. In fact, I tried for so long to make Sodagirl more arcade/action-puzzle-like, like Puyo Puyo, but in the end, the design took me elsewhere. Nonetheless, I love this type of game and this stream is so relaxing. + +The story of Nyoki Nyoki is kind of interesting as well. Compile, the original company behind Puyo Puyo, was run by Masashitsu ‘Moo’ Niitani and the game is credited to him as well. + +At the peak of Puyo Puyo popularity, they were making money hand over fist, but with a steady stream of failing games, the Puyo Puyo games got handled, and eventually became controlled/owned, by Sega. Moo fell on hard times and up till recently worked in a convenience store. Nyoki Nyoki is his big shot at a comeback and I wish him all the best of luck! + +I should mention that towards the end,the stream degenerates into a mess of cake eating and cameras pointing at nothing at all. It’s really quite amazing. diff --git a/drafts/Pikmin 3 - Calm Genocidal Multiplayer.md b/drafts/Pikmin 3 - Calm Genocidal Multiplayer.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f273883 --- /dev/null +++ b/drafts/Pikmin 3 - Calm Genocidal Multiplayer.md @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +

+ + +Something strange happened, and the section praising the multiplayer of Pikmin 3 disappeared from __every single review__, so I thought I’d append it here… + +Usually when I play multiplayer in video games, I find that it’s either a quite stressful (and rewarding) experience because a high degree of alertness is required at all times, or it’s a calmingly mind-numbing experience because I simply go through the numbers, but with friends. + +Pikmin 3 showed me it could be different. In the Bingo Battle mode, two players race to collect fruit while fighting wild life and occasionally (often) obstructing each other’s progress. But the race to collect fruit and the inability to effectively kill each other, made me experience a quite calm and relaxing competive affair. + +In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a game before that has an actual competitive multiplayer mode I could play when I wanted to relax! + +Additionally, there’s also a multiplayer mode where you work together with another player to kill enemies or gather fruit. This is one of those cases where the Wii U gamepad shows its brilliance. I and the person I play with take different role depending on our controller: + +- If I use Wii remote + nuchuck, I become a sort of direct force, hurrying towards known goals. + +- If I am holding the gamepad, I become the strategist, coordinating our two-man team, keeping tabs on un-collected fruits and planning routes for future improved attempts. + +Pikmin 3 is a classic of this generation and a game not praised enough. It gave me Calm Genocidal Multiplayer, and Tactical Local Berry Picking. diff --git a/drafts/Politics of Arithmetic and Terminology.html b/drafts/Politics of Arithmetic and Terminology.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..871d7ff --- /dev/null +++ b/drafts/Politics of Arithmetic and Terminology.html @@ -0,0 +1,52 @@ +


+

+ +

image is the Japanese cover for Dragon Quest 1, Painted by Akira Toriyama.

+ +

Prelude

+ +

Why are the numbers in my game what they are? They aren't refined enough for any distinguished game designer to ever even snort disapprovingly at me across the hall at GDC. Nor are they flamboyantly big enough to give anyone a mathematically swollen sense of self-worth.

+ +

In case I haven't yet had the chance to corner you in a dark alley and explain the intricate and quite provocatively ingenious ideas behind my game while I gut you like a fish 🐠, allow me: The Girl Who Kicked a Rabbit is about winning small, cutely violent battles against demonic rabbits, by manipulating them using your magics and your knowledge of the rabbits' behaviour.

+ +

While making the game, I started to ponder the numbers. They'd been picked without too much forethought, and it seemed like it was finally time to think about what the right numbers were for representing the Player's health, how much damage the enemies dealt, and various other, mechanically interesting but irrelevant to the story, details. From here is the processed, GMO-filled version of those thoughts.

+ +

Arithmetic

+ +

Have you heard of a perfect information game? Like Chess. You are aware of all your options, and all your opponents' options, and stats, and immediate ramifications at all times. It's very clean, beautiful even. Everything is laid bare, and the only gambling is whether one of the players falters or takes a bait.

+ +

It's design-by-practicality really. It's easier to make a game if all the rules can be contained inherently in the pieces. It would require a lot more resources to have each element contain additional data, like numbers to describe wellness, physical strength or, most outlandishly, personal history (lol).

+ +

A lot of complicated video games like to have bigger and more numbers. Stats that indicate minute attributes, and values so big that an increase in power becomes almost tangible. It's been like a kid in a candy store: "you like data and games? Here's a machine that can let you play games and handle all the data you could possibly want." Some might disagree, but it isn't even a bad thing. I love these games, and I think they would be absolutely tedious if I had to manage all the data myself. Consider Final Fantasy 7 Remake, which doesn't include the option to store combinations of equipment into reusable sets, or filter on the Materia items according to type, or store the loadout of Materia in sets. It’s a drag to pause this thrilling adventure every five minutes in a late stage of the game, to fiddle with an incredibly, and increasingly, long list of arcane jelly beans. I'm not sure the pieces in Chess would have had living equipment, whose own lived experience would be tracked individually, had the creators had the choice, but on the other hand, we sure didn't have digital games for a long time before Vagrant Story happened.

+ +

I've seen an opposing line of thought in strategic and tactical games by developers less tied to the whims of popularity (so much so that that line of thought feels like it has become the zeitgeist): integers should be small. One to five, never eleven. Humans cannot comprehend such voluminous digits, they say. They’re inspired by European board games, and really, it makes sense. Thinking this way is a tool to achieve a lot of interesting choices. The argument is that choosing between ‘Attack’ and ‘Fire Spell’ is an almost superficial choice, even if the result of this choice, is built on the back of a monstrous calculation and/or algorithm. Rather sensically, the belief is that each choice should have interesting results and allow for new interesting choices. I seem to remember a talk by Jonathan Blow about how games that didn’t provide anything, by his definition of course, worthwhile, were akin to unethical in that they robbed players of their life. The “by his definition” has become quite important to me. I like Blow’s ideas and creations, but he and I don’t like the same games. In fact, I very much enjoy a lot of games he would find unethical in their design. By his definition, I cannot deny what he says, but that’s the thing: if you get to decide the definition of something, you can win any argument. That’s where this “smaller numbers, interesting choices, worthwhile investment” sort of breaks down. It leaves room for people to like certain games for their stories, but insists that the game design of them is something one must trudge through to enjoy the only worthwhile aspect. It denies the value of good tactility, of spectacular results, of freedom from consequence, of familiarity.

+ +

That list of, let’s call them, virtues, isn’t part of what is normally discussed when discussing game design in the English-speaking world. Maybe it isn’t anywhere. Sure, making stuff feel good to interact with is important in all interfaces and surely in the UX world as well, but it isn’t normally something that in game design, is seen as equivalent to “interesting choices”.

+ +

This leads me to an odd situation, where most expressed thoughts around game design, are trying extremely hard to define, almost on an atomic scale, what is what in games, and at the same time, are arriving at conclusions that completely dismiss a great many of the games I’ve enjoyed over the years. If they aren’t outright dismissed as inherently poor design, they are disregarded for anything but their stories, and in the last ten year especially, these stories too, are dismissed out of hand as either offensive in an increasingly prudish culture, or too fantastical in a subculture that is constantly trying to prove how worthwhile it is (this is an idiot’s way of saying he likes anime tits and buttholes, and Japanese game design).

+ +

The odd situation becomes clear when I try to design something of my own, inspired by the works that I like, and I wish to draw on the theories of my peers, but realise, my peers are vehemently opposed to the design in the works I enjoy and reflect upon. My own game, The Girl Who Kicked a Rabbit, has evolved over the years, and currently (hopefully finally) arrived at being sort of a Japanese Role-Playing Game. Except… it doesn’t have experience points, levels, equipment (in a traditional sense) or a plethora of throwaway battles. You have a very limited number of actions, everything is defined in low integers, and all the battles (so far at least) are designed. It has a bunch of inter-connected systems, and none of your (very few) moves have similar effects. It doesn’t sound very much like a Japanese RPG, when I put it like that. Yet I have no desire to create a game of hard, tactical choices. I rather like how a player who isn’t very engaged with the systems, can find they’re own enjoyment in JRPGs, while the dedicated player can show their prowess through their knowledge of (and sometimes dedication to) the systems.

+ +

Hopefully I don't make it sound like I'm under the impression that all non-digital games don't require a lot of data management. Many data heavy and data management heavy games exist, and it's worth remembering that Dungeons & Dragons, the genre-defining game itself, sprang from a more data-laden branch of strategy games.

+ +

Terminology

+ +

Just for those that arrived late, let's recount that early video games like Ultima and Wizardry took their inspirations from D&D, and that the original and quintessential Japanese Role-Playing Game, Dragon Quest, which spawned its own sub-genre (in our mind, I'll get to that) was specifically inspired by Ultima and its ilk. In the most sci-fi nerdy sense, we have a case of branching timelines here people! What the Japanese people call an RPG diverted from what we call an RPG, at such an early stage, that appending "Japanese" in front of it, only makes it less grokkable. I'll dig into it later, but the gist is that the two types of RPGs are so unrelated that we seem to comprehend very little of what is the design theory behind RPGs in Japan, since we always refer back to how we've formulated our own understanding of RPGs. Outside Japan, RPGs would be defined by their meticulousness to details surrounding personal character development, and by how involved the player would be allowed to be in the outcome of the narrative. Surely I've enjoyed the battles in these games, but I must admit, it's often a bit trite. Complex spells in Baldur's Gate 2, and the occasional usage of the environment in some games alleviated this. It's actually kind of curious that the genre isn't called Fantasy Simulation Games. These elements didn’t just become the defining traits, but also virtues to uphold and strive for.

+ +

Compared to this, Japanese RPGs are focused stories, where the battles continue to be abstractions of the idea of battles, and over time a focus on adding and removing interesting, but very real-world-unrelated, sub-systems to the battles, and how the player characters evolve over the course of the playtime became more important. As the player improves their understanding of the game, they not only get access to new abilities, but often reach an understanding of what is already there, so that they may tackle even greater threats. Often though, they don’t have to do this, in order to participate in the story. Put in the terms that people use outside Japan, the RPG genre in Japan is a mix of what is often called an adventure game (a linear, character-driven story, perhaps with puzzles to solve), a strategy game (in that the battles become strategically difficult if you choose to invest in this area, not that the battles are like those of the games of StarCraft or similar (although that has also happened a few times)) and to a smaller extent an RPG (in that your characters evolve over time according to your choosing, based on a subsystem that controls this).

+ +

This detour is meant to illustrate the reason as to why I might have been looking at the reasoning for the numbers in my game incorrectly. Without realising it, I had created a game where numbers should be small, for a few good reasons. The implicit result of small numbers was that each choice had to matter, like in strategy games, like Into the Breach. The problem was that I was creating a game that was most closely related to an RPG in the Japanese sense, and they’ve created a gameplay aesthetic where choices CAN matter, depending on your level of investment, but they don’t have to.

+ +

When framing Japanese RPGs as a sub-genre, they are misconstrued, and every design choice ends up seeming like an oddity in comparison to what an RPG ought to be, and in game design these choices run counter to some (rather dogmatic) principles. Look, it's fine. Many of those that wrote down their design ideals in the last 10-20 years, did so while saying (kinda): "this is based partly on what I like, and trying to understand why I like it" (like what I'm doing now). They've become almost textbook (I guess sometimes actual textbook) definitions of what should be considered best practice in game design.

+ +

I thought it'd be elegant if I could unify the many elements in my game design, so that mechanics were tied to each other through reasoning and likewise gave rise to the numbers. As I contemplated and tweaked the numbers, I encountered this conflict between what small, discreet numbers culturally indicated, and what my intentions for my game were. One day I made a canteen of coffee and rode my bike into the forest. In the early autumn beech forest, I climbed a small hill and found a nice spot where I could overlook both the nearby trail and even the ocean. Sipping on my coffee and a sourdough bun I'd bought a few minutes earlier, it started to dawn on me: sure, I needed to reconfigure my game. At the same time, I should start realising that I wasn't making an arcade-like version of a strategy game. At heart, my game was a miniature Japanese RPG, and thirty years of genre conflation had made it difficult to arrive at the legitimacy of this conclusion.

+ +

Getting Out of The Water

+ +

There's this fantastic conversation between Shigeru Miyamoto, Satoru Iwata, and Shigesato Itoi where they discuss why Mother 3 had to be cancelled for the Nintendo 64. Of the numerous thoughtful observations, among them is Itoi saying "An RPG is a system where symbols come together, and something happens which is portrayed in even more symbols."(here) While the point of that part of the conversation is very much about how Mario games make concretisations of what would be abstract in a Japanese RPG, the flipside is that Japanese RPGs of that era were able to represent vast and complex narrative structures and game design, within simple symbols of storytelling. It's not a concise genre definition, but I think it distinguishes this bifurcated genre quite clearly.

+ +

This text was initially meant to be about my ponderings on my game, in an effort to understand certain aspects of my game design. As I worked on it, and my own misunderstandings became clear to me, I feel like I achieved this understanding, that is about which genre The Girl Who Kicked a Rabbit actually tried to be part of. Unfortunately I also realised that the Japanese RPG isn't really well understood from a modern, English-language game design perspective. As I was going over whether or not this text was achieving what it was meant to, and what I needed to write to do this, it became apparent that this side-effect of understanding is bigger than I'm ready to take on right now. It'll take more observations, research, analysis, and discussions. It's as simple as "what is the Japanese RPG", but I can't settle for a banal enumeration of characteristic traits. Itoi's observation is certainly good, yet even it requires a bit of contemplation, and doesn't answer other questions I feel fit into this topic, like how Animal Crossing doesn't fit the genre of "Japanese RPG" yet it feels right calling it quintessentially Japanese and simultaneously an RPG. Genre-breaking traits like warfare simulation in Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings or action combat in Final Fantasy 7 Remake also muddle the issue. I fear to even bring up Giftpia or Bloodborne.

+ +

At a certain point, it almost becomes a question of what is it for a game to be Japanese, and not specifically an RPG from the Japanese game design heritage. By then, I'm right back at what I was writing about in university ten years ago.

+ +

These are all thoughts for the future. For now, I got the answers I was looking for, and the rest I chip away at some other day.

diff --git a/drafts/Politics of Arithmetic and Terminology.md b/drafts/Politics of Arithmetic and Terminology.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ff28578 --- /dev/null +++ b/drafts/Politics of Arithmetic and Terminology.md @@ -0,0 +1,54 @@ +


+ + +_image is the Japanese cover for Dragon Quest 1, Painted by Akira Toriyama._ + +__Prelude__ + +Why are the numbers in my game what they are? They aren't refined enough for any distinguished game designer to ever even snort disapprovingly at me across the hall at GDC. Nor are they flamboyantly big enough to give anyone a mathematically swollen sense of self-worth. + +In case I haven't yet had the chance to corner you in a dark alley and explain the intricate and quite provocatively ingenious ideas behind my game while I gut you like a fish 🐠, allow me: _The Girl Who Kicked a Rabbit_ is about winning small, cutely violent battles against demonic rabbits, by manipulating them using your magics and your knowledge of the rabbits' behaviour. + +While making the game, I started to ponder the numbers. They'd been picked without too much forethought, and it seemed like it was finally time to think about what the right numbers were for representing the Player's health, how much damage the enemies dealt, and various other, mechanically interesting but irrelevant to the story, details. From here is the processed, GMO-filled version of those thoughts. + +__Arithmetic__ + +Have you heard of a perfect information game? Like Chess. You are aware of all your options, and all your opponents' options, and stats, and immediate ramifications at all times. It's very clean, beautiful even. Everything is laid bare, and the only gambling is whether one of the players falters or takes a bait. + +It's design-by-practicality really. It's easier to make a game if all the rules can be contained inherently in the pieces. It would require a lot more resources to have each element contain additional data, like numbers to describe wellness, physical strength or, most outlandishly, personal history (lol). + +A lot of complicated video games like to have bigger and more numbers. Stats that indicate minute attributes, and values so big that an increase in power becomes almost tangible. It's been like a kid in a candy store: "you like data and games? Here's a machine that can let you play games and handle all the data you could possibly want." Some might disagree, but it isn't even a bad thing. I love these games, and I think they would be absolutely tedious if I had to manage all the data myself. Consider _Final Fantasy 7 Remake_, which doesn't include the option to store combinations of equipment into reusable sets, or filter on the Materia items according to type, or store the loadout of Materia in sets. It’s a drag to pause this thrilling adventure every five minutes in a late stage of the game, to fiddle with an incredibly, and increasingly, long list of arcane jelly beans. I'm not sure the pieces in Chess would have had living equipment, whose own lived experience would be tracked individually, had the creators had the choice, but on the other hand, we sure didn't have digital games for a long time before _Vagrant Story_ happened. + +I've seen an opposing line of thought in strategic and tactical games by developers less tied to the whims of popularity (so much so that that line of thought feels like it has become the zeitgeist): integers should be small. One to five, never eleven. Humans cannot comprehend such voluminous digits, they say. They’re inspired by European board games, and really, it makes sense. Thinking this way is a tool to achieve a lot of interesting choices. The argument is that choosing between ‘Attack’ and ‘Fire Spell’ is an almost superficial choice, even if the result of this choice, is built on the back of a monstrous calculation and/or algorithm. Rather sensically, the belief is that each choice should have interesting results and allow for new interesting choices. I seem to remember a talk by Jonathan Blow about how games that didn’t provide anything, by his definition of course, worthwhile, were akin to unethical in that they robbed players of their life. The “by his definition” has become quite important to me. I like Blow’s ideas and creations, but he and I don’t like the same games. In fact, I very much enjoy a lot of games he would find unethical in their design. By his definition, I cannot deny what he says, but that’s the thing: if you get to decide the definition of something, you can win any argument. That’s where this “smaller numbers, interesting choices, worthwhile investment” sort of breaks down. It leaves room for people to like certain games for their stories, but insists that the game design of them is something one must trudge through to enjoy the only worthwhile aspect. It denies the value of good tactility, of spectacular results, of freedom from consequence, of familiarity. + +That list of, let’s call them, virtues, isn’t part of what is normally discussed when discussing game design in the English-speaking world. Maybe it isn’t anywhere. Sure, making stuff feel good to interact with is important in all interfaces and surely in the UX world as well, but it isn’t normally something that in game design, is seen as equivalent to “interesting choices”. + +This leads me to an odd situation, where most expressed thoughts around game design, are trying extremely hard to define, almost on an atomic scale, what is what in games, and at the same time, are arriving at conclusions that completely dismiss a great many of the games I’ve enjoyed over the years. If they aren’t outright dismissed as inherently poor design, they are disregarded for anything but their stories, and in the last ten year especially, these stories too, are dismissed out of hand as either offensive in an increasingly prudish culture, or too fantastical in a subculture that is constantly trying to prove how worthwhile it is (this is an idiot’s way of saying he likes anime tits and buttholes, and Japanese game design). + +The odd situation becomes clear when I try to design something of my own, inspired by the works that I like, and I wish to draw on the theories of my peers, but realise, my peers are vehemently opposed to the design in the works I enjoy and reflect upon. My own game, _The Girl Who Kicked a Rabbit_, has evolved over the years, and currently (hopefully finally) arrived at being sort of a Japanese Role-Playing Game. Except… it doesn’t have experience points, levels, equipment (in a traditional sense) or a plethora of throwaway battles. You have a very limited number of actions, everything is defined in low integers, and all the battles (so far at least) are designed. It has a bunch of inter-connected systems, and none of your (very few) moves have similar effects. It doesn’t sound very much like a Japanese RPG, when I put it like that. Yet I have no desire to create a game of hard, tactical choices. I rather like how a player who isn’t very engaged with the systems, can find they’re own enjoyment in JRPGs, while the dedicated player can show their prowess through their knowledge of (and sometimes dedication to) the systems. + +Hopefully I don't make it sound like I'm under the impression that all non-digital games don't require a lot of data management. Many data heavy and data management heavy games exist, and it's worth remembering that Dungeons & Dragons, the genre-defining game itself, sprang from a more data-laden branch of strategy games. + +__Terminology__ + +Just for those that arrived late, let's recount that early video games like _Ultima_ and _Wizardry_ took their inspirations from D&D, and that the original and quintessential Japanese Role-Playing Game, _Dragon Quest_, which spawned its own sub-genre (in our mind, I'll get to that) was specifically inspired by _Ultima_ and its ilk. In the most sci-fi nerdy sense, we have a case of branching timelines here people! What the Japanese people call an RPG diverted from what we call an RPG, at such an early stage, that appending "Japanese" in front of it, only makes it less grokkable. I'll dig into it later, but the gist is that the two types of RPGs are so unrelated that we seem to comprehend very little of what is the design theory behind RPGs in Japan, since we always refer back to how we've formulated our own understanding of RPGs. Outside Japan, RPGs would be defined by their meticulousness to details surrounding personal character development, and by how involved the player would be allowed to be in the outcome of the narrative. Surely I've enjoyed the battles in these games, but I must admit, it's often a bit trite. Complex spells in _Baldur's Gate 2_, and the occasional usage of the environment in some games alleviated this. It's actually kind of curious that the genre isn't called Fantasy Simulation Games. These elements didn’t just become the defining traits, but also virtues to uphold and strive for. + +Compared to this, Japanese RPGs are focused stories, where the battles continue to be abstractions of the idea of battles, and over time a focus on adding and removing interesting, but very real-world-unrelated, sub-systems to the battles, and how the player characters evolve over the course of the playtime became more important. As the player improves their understanding of the game, they not only get access to new abilities, but often reach an understanding of what is already there, so that they may tackle even greater threats. Often though, they don’t have to do this, in order to participate in the story. Put in the terms that people use outside Japan, the RPG genre in Japan is a mix of what is often called an adventure game (a linear, character-driven story, perhaps with puzzles to solve), a strategy game (in that the battles become strategically difficult if you choose to invest in this area, not that the battles are like those of the games of _StarCraft_ or similar (although that has also happened a few times)) and to a smaller extent an RPG (in that your characters evolve over time according to your choosing, based on a subsystem that controls this). + +This detour is meant to illustrate the reason as to why I might have been looking at the reasoning for the numbers in my game incorrectly. Without realising it, I had created a game where numbers should be small, for a few good reasons. The implicit result of small numbers was that each choice had to matter, like in strategy games, like _Into the Breach_. The problem was that I was creating a game that was most closely related to an RPG in the Japanese sense, and they’ve created a gameplay aesthetic where choices CAN matter, depending on your level of investment, but they don’t have to. + +When framing Japanese RPGs as a sub-genre, they are misconstrued, and every design choice ends up seeming like an oddity in comparison to what an RPG ought to be, and in game design these choices run counter to some (rather dogmatic) principles. Look, it's fine. Many of those that wrote down their design ideals in the last 10-20 years, did so while saying (kinda): "this is based partly on what I like, and trying to understand why I like it" (like what I'm doing now). They've become almost textbook (I guess sometimes actual textbook) definitions of what should be considered best practice in game design. + +I thought it'd be elegant if I could unify the many elements in my game design, so that mechanics were tied to each other through reasoning and likewise gave rise to the numbers. As I contemplated and tweaked the numbers, I encountered this conflict between what small, discreet numbers culturally indicated, and what my intentions for my game were. One day I made a canteen of coffee and rode my bike into the forest. In the early autumn beech forest, I climbed a small hill and found a nice spot where I could overlook both the nearby trail and even the ocean. Sipping on my coffee and a sourdough bun I'd bought a few minutes earlier, it started to dawn on me: sure, I needed to reconfigure my game. At the same time, I should start realising that I wasn't making an arcade-like version of a strategy game. At heart, my game was a miniature Japanese RPG, and thirty years of genre conflation had made it difficult to arrive at the legitimacy of this conclusion. + +__Getting Out of The Water__ + +There's this fantastic conversation between Shigeru Miyamoto, Satoru Iwata, and Shigesato Itoi where they discuss why _Mother 3_ had to be cancelled for the Nintendo 64. Of the numerous thoughtful observations, among them is Itoi saying "An RPG is a system where symbols come together, and something happens which is portrayed in even more symbols."(here) While the point of that part of the conversation is very much about how Mario games make concretisations of what would be abstract in a Japanese RPG, the flipside is that Japanese RPGs of that era were able to represent vast and complex narrative structures and game design, within simple symbols of storytelling. It's not a concise genre definition, but I think it distinguishes this bifurcated genre quite clearly. + +This text was initially meant to be about my ponderings on my game, in an effort to understand certain aspects of my game design. As I worked on it, and my own misunderstandings became clear to me, I feel like I achieved this understanding, that is about which genre _The Girl Who Kicked a Rabbit_ actually tried to be part of. Unfortunately I also realised that the Japanese RPG isn't really well understood from a modern, English-language game design perspective. As I was going over whether or not this text was achieving what it was meant to, and what I needed to write to do this, it became apparent that this side-effect of understanding is bigger than I'm ready to take on right now. It'll take more observations, research, analysis, and discussions. It's as simple as "what _is_ the Japanese RPG", but I can't settle for a banal enumeration of characteristic traits. Itoi's observation is certainly good, yet even it requires a bit of contemplation, and doesn't answer other questions I feel fit into this topic, like how _Animal Crossing_ doesn't fit the genre of "Japanese RPG" yet it feels right calling it quintessentially Japanese and simultaneously an RPG. Genre-breaking traits like warfare simulation in _Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings_ or action combat in _Final Fantasy 7 Remake_ also muddle the issue. I fear to even bring up _Giftpia_ or _Bloodborne_. + +At a certain point, it almost becomes a question of what is it for a game to be Japanese, and not specifically an RPG from the Japanese game design heritage. By then, I'm right back at what I was writing about in university ten years ago. + +These are all thoughts for the future. For now, I got the answers I was looking for, and the rest I chip away at some other day. + + diff --git a/drafts/Reference to a Cosmic Answer (Outer Wilds).html b/drafts/Reference to a Cosmic Answer (Outer Wilds).html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c56bf98 --- /dev/null +++ b/drafts/Reference to a Cosmic Answer (Outer Wilds).html @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +


+ +The closer to perfection, the more scarring a single blemish. That’s not petty, it’s a single drop of wine on a white dress. How could you not see it? That doesn’t detract from the quality, craftsmanship, or design choices. It would just be more prudent to not sew a dress with a glass of merlot in your hand. Outer Wilds doesn’t exactly have any flaws. Bugs, sure, but not something that is less than it could be, or is not quite achieved as well as it should be. Instead, for all that Wilds is, there is somewhere in it where an absence of a more… no less. Hmm. I realise that the more terse my description of this that is not observed, is, the less worth of discussion it is. “The more I prob it up to be something noteworthy, the more noteworthy it is”? No, it's not like that. There are some experiences in life that will drift away from understanding as soon as you solidify them in specifics, the actual experience being no less real, yet all the more elusive. Certain (most?) parts of Wilds seem like they would benefit from being discussed by an expert. Obviously how it uses physics comes to mind first, but beyond that, where Wilds fits in the culture of science fiction is worth looking at. Wilds itself is not heavy on cutscenes, but while it elaborates on its story through writing all over the solar system you traverse, you actively get to experience most of what the story describes to you. Not through being present when conversations took place, but by seeing and understanding what the properties, machines, and planetary bodies do, so that old conversations make sense. Both as a game and as a science fiction story, this makes Wilds something different, though my proclivity to shun science fiction novels simply because I almost universally hate their covers, makes me regret that I haven’t read more in this genre, so as to see where it fits in the greater picture of such literature. Simply by the sheer volume of fantasy games, movies, and novels that I’ve dissolved in one of my many maws, I can attest that best stories are usually found in the novels. That’s just a fact, and a self-evident one. Novels are, pretty much always, about the story. Movies contend with more elements. Games, even more. It would follow that science fiction games face the same challenges, and when Wilds then makes me think it’s a brilliant science fiction game, I sure would like to know if it’s a remarkable science fiction story in general. Perhaps savvy science fiction readers have come to like certain story aspects of the genre, despite how often they occur, or perhaps there are those that have seen through the veil, and come to understand that what I find indicative of something that is to dislike in Wilds, is simply an unavoidable consequence of the story that is being told. It can’t be denied that I might not be criticising Wilds for how it does what it does, but lamenting something that it isn’t, and I’ll be the first to say: it’s not fair to knock it for that.

+ +

Kinda feels like we've been through this before, right? Oh, I'm not trying to be clever. It just occurs to me that the very act of doing something in a loop, slowly uncovering every minute detail, and becoming an almost celestial being, not just for your repetitive nature, but because of your by the end almost omniscience, is the essence of video games. Whether it's the kill, death, repeat mantra of so many games, or it's the "trapped in a loop to uncover all the secrets'', they're essentially the same. Not only am I claiming an almost pedestrian "other games have done the time loop mechanic before". I'm ascending to absolute Zetta Emperor of Pedantics, and saying "pff, every game is a time loop". This is a fancy way of getting anybody who has played Wilds, into a frenzy before getting to my actual theory: what makes Wilds' take on time loops unique, is not exactly its combination with astro and particle physics, but rather that its devotion to using those fields playfully, and the almost template-tier first person mechanics (you move, you jump, you press interact), creates a contour of the player. And the player is not the immediate character controlled by you. The player is the universe. The player character is a cursor. It's what happens when an idea is larger than a gun. And Wilds is a drunken knife fight, with the sun. Any other game will put a boson rifle in your hand, and, really, that would have been an intergalactic carnival. Wilds gives you gravity itself, and it takes an entire game to wield this.

+ +

Reading about Wilds elsewhere gives me the impression that we're talking about the type of game that is intended to be played by those not versed in stock mainstream video games. The kind that are assailed after psychotic Americans pull a weekly. When made for such a person (the one who doesn't like games, not the mass murderer), the game is often made reductively easy to play and to win. Clearly I’m getting the wrong impression. Wilds is not harsh, it just doesn’t care about you. It’s as indifferent to the player as the subjects described in all the Wikipedia articles the players will read afterwards to assimilate a modicum of knowledge about these, are. In Wilds it’s tough to walk, jump and even look around. It’s so very driven by its physics, but also, as a consequence, by its lack of being very game-like at all. Very few elements snap, click or crack. Everything just sort of slides, floats, and flops around. This irked me to no end in the beginning. Feeling my own mastery of the player character's actions increases is how I bond (get stockholm syndrome) with a game. If Wilds was gonna play like eating pizza with a hammer, I had some concerns about finishing the thing. I'm not gonna lie, in the beginning I didn't like it, and I only stuck it out because I thought it was a 3-4 hour experience. It's definitely bigger than that, though simply by being such a designed experience, a by necessity, finite experience. As I started to realise what I was getting into, I understood this wasn't a game that had failed at achieving sharp, eloquent controls. It was striving for something else entirely and telling me would have been spoiling the surprise. Before I could afford new consoles, I spent a great deal of time playing overlooked, often fan-translated, NES, and SNES games. Once you dig into the more arcane libraries, you realise how little video games have grown and how little they need modern controllers. Many of them are still (gameplay-wise) two-dimensional. Not so with Wilds. The core of the game is continuous, not discrete. Despite how little is done by the player from their perspective, the use of not one, but TWO analog sticks absolutely makes the experience. I guess some people use a mouse and a keyboard. The point is, an SNES version of this game wouldn't even be remotely close to achieving the same reactions as Wilds does in its very reality inspired form. The more I think about it, the more I want to make this impossible SNES game. I think I see how. This isn't about that. That doesn't matter, the method of implementing my idea is taking shape as I write this. I'll keep it for myself (three days have passed since I wrote that. I was sober. Then drunk. Then hungover. It was a terribly uninspired idea. I would still play it if someone else did it, but I would know. I would IMMEDIATELY know how absolutely void of critical thought or inspirational light they were). So since it’s not very game-like, and if I get the impression that it’s not for gamers, shouldn’t these two parts spoon like an appropriately proportioned couple? A buddy of mine called it a Walking Sim in a non-disparaging manner. While I'm not quite sure how he mentally juggled those two perspectives (an (in my mind) derogative descriptor, and it being admirable), it really isn't. Movement is involved, and complex. It requires an enormous amount of spatial and temporal reasoning. The puzzles are esoteric and often non-euclidean. Every task asked to perform is contingent on a wealth of game experience in order to even be navigable, though in the Venn-diagram of experienced players and Hailey "who like, once tried the Flappy Birds", neither really has the prerequisite skills to actually solve the conundrums. Admittedly, me liking Wilds oscillated immensely for each time I opened the game up. It seemed impenetrable in the beginning and certain puzzles were definitely made more troublesome than necessary by the game's inherent impression. Dropping it entirely was definitely on the table even about an hour before completing it, it was that frustrating. Then it dawned on me how the task at hand was a puzzle and not an exercise in aptitude, and I was able to reach an ending that a second buddy had described as quite good (I don't know what he said. He liked it, okay?). He was right.

+ +

To my first buddy I would say "you mean Gone Home without all gay stuff?". Wilds is Metroid Prime for people who roll their eyes at ice cream, though you can play it even if you like the sweet dessert. It's excellent. You get to actually discover ancient secrets not designed to combine the aesthetics of Gieger with the usability of Fisher-Price and the functionality of being a god damned fucking door. Cutting out the lawn-mowing of alien lifeforms (except your own), and the fitting of pegs into holes (ironically this is one of the few actions you perform besides Space Walking (that sounds like being a prost on the ISS (speaking of pegs and holes!))) really alleviates the dissonance apparent in most lore or story driven games not made by Kojima. This trait of letting you almost truly discover alien civilizations and puzzle out their secrets should not be forgotten. Creating it required Mobius Digital Games (their CEO is Masi Oka from Heroes, how weird is that?) to completely ignore the sensible choice of ever holding the player's hand. Yet if that’s what it took. This praise unfortunately makes the next criticism so much more annoying. Almost all information comes from log messages left behind, and though they're covered up as alien scribbles with an interesting linguistic and technological twist, they're log messages. I hate to invoke The Return of the Obra Dinn, but it showed us all how elegantly and not-in-conflict with the in-game universe, narrative exposition could be. It hurts, it really does, that Wilds was not able to avoid conveniently left behind thoughts and commentary by those no longer among the living, at just the right time. And what an unfair criticism. Solving that problem for this game, feels like it would be an achievement every other game afterwards would copy faster than I can brew an exquisite cup of coffee for a friend, and then smugly await their praise, knowing full well that you’d have to be a social deviant to ever say anything but “mmm, sure is a good coffee”. Not that my coffee brewing technique, selection of beans, and manner of grinding aren't in a class of their own. It took me a long time to admit to myself, but the quality isn't imagined at all. I'm almost shaking now. I suddenly remembered someone asking for a drop of milk. That's just not right. Milk covers up the problems of bad coffee, it doesn't enhance the virtues of good coffee. Learn the difference.

+ +

Before starting university a second time (of three) I took a trip to the city it was located in. We visited the school of architecture, and I was consumed with jealousy for my girlfriend. That place was overflowing with creative energy, and the promise of what its students were going to achieve. Afterwards we went to the university and wandered the halls and I couldn't help but feel disappointed in myself. I had wanted to enter the animation school. Having failed in creating an enticing portfolio twice, dropping out of university once, and being unemployed in the spring of 2009 (an unfortunate time to need a job in many places), I thought I might as well try studying Japanese. There was something stuffy and old about the university. It was a feeling I've later come to reminisce about, disappointed that the Asian Studies department was moved to a more modern, almost corporate, building later on, but during that little trip to the city, I found it off-putting. Fortunately the day was much improved afterwards. We ate lunch in the university park and watched some guys play some sort of soccer-based drinking game, and then strolled down the hill into a hip cafe area, drinking fancy coffee, and going to art supply shops. This was a big, and pretty city, for hip young people like me and my girlfriend. A few years later, uni was over, and I felt like I’d been everywhere over, and over, and over, again. It’s obvious why I would tie a place’s size to how much you know of it, and reciprocally, why it would seem almost unfathomably big when you know nothing of it. Naturally, games might be similar, and it is often why we move on to other games. Except, even when we move on, some things stay with us, leaving a feeling of not exactly being unexplored as much as still having stories to tell, that it will never reveal. How, and when this feeling is achieved (and it is something to achieve) I am not quite sure. It can be a bitter feeling. Sometimes I imagine a story has built itself up so that I will absolutely be told about the how’s and the why’s, but then in the end there was just nothing. Sometimes it’s an actual problem with the story, a plothole one might say. Sometimes, I need to look at myself and realize I was missing the point. And of course, sometimes, I got the point, but it wasn’t very profound, and they really should just have finished LOST like a normal story, they weren’t Dostoevsky (I’m not saying he wrote obtuse narratives, I’m saying he was profound and if he did write something a little cryptic, it wouldn’t have been forced, but to whatever point he was making). The ability to achieve a complete understanding of Wilds, is its most game-like feature. It is a book manuscript that the author printed without page numbers, and threw into the air. Eventually you’ll piece the book back together and it was actually The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Could Wilds still be a game if you got all the way to Bowser’s Castle and then went “I still have no idea how jumping works''? I kind of know what the ludological answer is, but I really don’t want to say that Final Fantasy XV is the Infinite Jest of video games.

+ +

Wilds has no predeterminism, no sudden villain, no 'we took this form because your mind couldn't comprehend our actual form'. Hells bells, there isn't even any higher dimensionality. The last one would probably have been pretty cool in Wilds (but also outside confirmed reality). So would time dilation (which I thought would be present), and Dark Matter. That's okay. Material for a sequel that'll hopefully never manifest. You don’t want a sequel to Little Miss Sunshine either, you know? Time dilation would actually solve a mechanical problem the game has, now that I think about it: Only want to try a single thing, but can’t because a bunch of stuff needs to occur beforehand? Take a nap near a black hole and watch time snail by at a breakneck pace. I’m not criticising Wilds for not having this, I just thought the idea was fun. Those initial "doesn't have"s are meant as praise. I've certainly never written a science fiction story, but assume it must feel awfully good including the time travel paradox of "you tell me to go, cause I told you to tell me, cause you told me to…". Why else would it happen so often? Anyway, well done, writers, not only for writing a good story, but for performing what I assume must be delaying the purest sexual gratification a science fiction author can get?

+ +

I read in a book about octopi that humans are unique because they think in terms of time. At least I think it was the octopus book. Might have been the book about time. We are always thinking about cause and effect. It’s how you solve every challenge in this game, how you formulate ideas for how to continue, and eventually it’s how you begin to see where everything is going. It’s even, sort of, where the fun in the game is. It’s in the in-between of not knowing and already knowing, that makes you go “oh, now I get it”. Really, the fun is gone after you “got” it. Wilds also has you say “oh that’s really cool”, and saying that is pretty fun too. Yet about half way through it, I understood how this would end, and I knew it was how it had to be. I didn’t know every second for second how it would play out, but if you were to finish Wilds and talk with me about it, you’d know what I mean. I’m being coy about it, because saying it outright is crude. It’s a question of scale. Of the game, and of the theme. It’s inherent in Wild’s reluctance to be game-like. It’s not actually specifically because of those convenient space emails. They are definitely symptoms, but even without them, this shape-like thought would still have formulated. In the very first paragraph I mentioned wine on a dress, but really, it’s a freckle. Freckles aren’t ugly, they’re just there. Occasionally they’re very cute. In this case it’s being told of how a friend’s friend looks. They’re red-headed, your friend says. Later on it dawns on you that your friend’s friend probably has freckles. Not that your friend’s friend was designed and cloned in a vat, but if they were, it would have been a little daring of your friend’s friend’s designers, to omit the freckles.

+ +

Are you getting the sense that the problem I'm describing with Wilds lies outside a conventionally fair point to make? Or that I'm just observing the tiniest possible issue with an electron microscope? Were this a review, it's the kind of notion that gets hidden in a box of extra thoughts, almost a pet peeve. Instead it's the only thing I can think about, constantly appearing and disappearing from my mind when I consider my time with Wilds. The minimalist internal mechanics of the player character, the universal mechanics of the game's reality, and the narrative that permeates the setting, are all building upon each other, overlapping and gesturing me towards a specific somewhere. Yes, I am outside what is conventionally worthy of praise or necessitates rebuke, but it is an overarching issue that will mortify as a trope, and eventually make those that came before Wilds into involuntary self-parody. This isn't because Wilds caused it, but when such a complete and thoroughly crafted experience does this, almost (I suspect) by default, it might be worth addressing, no matter how circuitously.

+ +

I had brought my Nintendo 64 on a trip. It must have been somewhere around 2001. This was the last time I cared about one of those time looping games. I think it was an important birthday for one of my paternal grandparents, and we couldn’t make it home on the same day, so we were gonna stay at a hotel. This was definitely exciting to me. Hotels in Denmark are ludicrously expensive, and therefore, to my 12 year old me, they were good. To this day I probably haven’t stayed at a high quality hotel yet. Now that I think about it, saying something like that probably just outs me as a person who has yet to realize that a high quality hotel is an oxymoron. It seemed fancy at the time. Majora’s Mask had been a frustrating journey, and a childishly disappointing one as well. I’d definitely hoped for Ocarina of Time 2. This was something else. I wish I’d been a discerning enough kid to realize that it meant something much, much better, but sadly, I wanted a big world, ten dungeons, and for that nail in the dick of a time loop to scram. The frustrating experience had been compounded because my brother and I had decided to complete it together, but there sure had been some misunderstandings about when to play, such that progression had been made in the absence of the other, and this inconsiderate behaviour had left some bitterness behind. My brother finished elementary school by doing the optional tenth grade at a sort of boarding school. This is normal in Denmark. These schools often have a specific focus, like an art curriculum. My brother’s school was about health and exercise. It had a running team, all punishment was dealt out in push ups and they went swimming in the ocean every morning, including all through winter. Him staying at this school might have been why I had brought the Nintendo 64. He wouldn’t have been able to continue playing if he was only at home once a month or every other month, but we had maybe picked him up for this birthday party. I must have reached the moon, ready to face off against Majora. The artstyle of this game, coupled with its melancholic setting, and subdued story all coalesce into an incredible ending. We didn’t have all the masks. We didn’t even have the Great Fairy’s Sword. This didn’t matter. This game was a league above its contemporaries (and successors?). Had I already finished it before this evening, and simply wanted to show the ending to my brother? Or had I held off finishing the journey until he could join in? Whatever the case, I remember how he didn’t really care. Not that anyone ever really knows what anyone is thinking, but to say that he is to me a black box with an effectively incomprehensible behaviour pattern, is apt. Maybe he felt betrayed that I had played without him. Or maybe he had just moved on from odd Japanese games towards a strict Counter-Strike 1.6-based diet. It's been twenty years since then and I haven't spoken to him for the last two. In fact it was Easter two years ago, so writing this during Easter means it's exactly two years ago. Where we are when we play things, feed into our play experience, and depending on the various factors in the game, also feed back out again. I don't know if I had had Outer Wilds on my radar before, but after completing The Return of the Obra Dinn together with my girlfriend in a one hundred percent cooperative manner, I was really hoping Wilds would provide something similar. I wish we could have repeated the success, because I eventually had a great experience, but she fell asleep on my lap after twenty minutes and I don't blame her. Wilds has no room for a co-pilot, neither in the spacecraft or in real life. We might not be able to do and redo the same events anywhere but in our mind, fermenting on our errors and constructing illusions of how else to have gone about things. Eerily similar situations happen. Not just as a déjà vu, but simply as everyday affairs. In order to handle life, it’s natural to construct patterns, heuristic solutions, when the same problems arise over and over. Life is not a time loop and doing this has made me cause pain to others. We change, and using the same words, thoughts, or behaviour to console or to be present, when people are sad or hurting, will make things worse. Because the loop becomes real, but only in yourself. You don’t see how the problem is no longer what it used to be, and you’re just predicting behaviour. When the problem hasn’t even changed, it’s even more hurtful. Acting ahead, to remedy a situation that hasn’t happened yet, but will, is disallowing others to express their pain, and they see the frustration in your eyes, when they realize you’re stuck in a loop of your own expectations. I am still in those phone calls with my brother two years ago, arguing, trying to make him see my side. Later my father calls. The problem is too abstract. I waited too many years to confront the issues, because I knew the result. I still know the result, and so I’m stuck in that memory of that evening after Easter. I’m thinking about the regret I will feel once it is too late, and trying to find a way out. A way back. Is this the same behaviour as I scolded myself for before? Perhaps partly. There are too many indicators of future behaviour for me to think it won’t happen again. I’m not talking about a heinous act or anything concretely abusive, but a thoroughly negligent, disregarding, and condescending behaviour, that no longer will affect just me. What a bitter, borderline spiteful choice to make out of a need to protect those I love and who depend upon me. That almost makes me sound like I’m trying to praise myself, when I’m actually saying I’m defaulting to behaviour that must seem to everyone else, childish, and to me, a damned shame.

diff --git a/drafts/Reference to a Cosmic Answer (Outer Wilds).md b/drafts/Reference to a Cosmic Answer (Outer Wilds).md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7bd8ecb --- /dev/null +++ b/drafts/Reference to a Cosmic Answer (Outer Wilds).md @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +

+ +The closer to perfection, the more scarring a single blemish. That’s not petty, it’s a single drop of wine on a white dress. How could you not see it? That doesn’t detract from the quality, craftsmanship, or design choices. It would just be more prudent to not sew a dress with a glass of merlot in your hand. _Outer Wilds_ doesn’t exactly have any flaws. Bugs, sure, but not something that is less than it could be, or is not quite achieved as well as it should be. Instead, for all that _Wilds_ is, there is somewhere in it where an absence of a more… no less. Hmm. I realise that the more terse my description of this that is not observed, is, the less worth of discussion it is. “The more I prob it up to be something noteworthy, the more noteworthy it is”? No, it's not like that. There are some experiences in life that will drift away from understanding as soon as you solidify them in specifics, the actual experience being no less real, yet all the more elusive. Certain (most?) parts of _Wilds_ seem like they would benefit from being discussed by an expert. Obviously how it uses physics comes to mind first, but beyond that, where _Wilds_ fits in the culture of science fiction is worth looking at. _Wilds_ itself is not heavy on cutscenes, but while it elaborates on its story through writing all over the solar system you traverse, you actively get to experience most of what the story describes to you. Not through being present when conversations took place, but by seeing and understanding what the properties, machines, and planetary bodies do, so that old conversations make sense. Both as a game and as a science fiction story, this makes _Wilds_ something different, though my proclivity to shun science fiction novels simply because I almost universally hate their covers, makes me regret that I haven’t read more in this genre, so as to see where it fits in the greater picture of such literature. Simply by the sheer volume of fantasy games, movies, and novels that I’ve dissolved in one of my many maws, I can attest that best stories are usually found in the novels. That’s just a fact, and a self-evident one. Novels are, pretty much always, about the story. Movies contend with more elements. Games, even more. It would follow that science fiction games face the same challenges, and when _Wilds_ then makes me think it’s a brilliant science fiction game, I sure would like to know if it’s a remarkable science fiction story in general. Perhaps savvy science fiction readers have come to like certain story aspects of the genre, despite how often they occur, or perhaps there are those that have seen through the veil, and come to understand that what I find indicative of something that is to dislike in _Wilds_, is simply an unavoidable consequence of the story that is being told. It can’t be denied that I might not be criticising _Wilds_ for how it does what it does, but lamenting something that it isn’t, and I’ll be the first to say: it’s not fair to knock it for that. + +Kinda feels like we've been through this before, right? Oh, I'm not trying to be clever. It just occurs to me that the very act of doing something in a loop, slowly uncovering every minute detail, and becoming an almost celestial being, not just for your repetitive nature, but because of your by the end almost omniscience, is the essence of video games. Whether it's the kill, death, repeat mantra of so many games, or it's the "trapped in a loop to uncover all the secrets'', they're essentially the same. Not only am I claiming an almost pedestrian "other games have done the time loop mechanic before". I'm ascending to absolute Zetta Emperor of Pedantics, and saying "pff, every game is a time loop". This is a fancy way of getting anybody who has played _Wilds_, into a frenzy before getting to my actual theory: what makes _Wilds_' take on time loops unique, is not exactly its combination with astro and particle physics, but rather that its devotion to using those fields playfully, and the almost template-tier first person mechanics (you move, you jump, you press interact), creates a contour of the player. And the player is not the immediate character controlled by you. The player is the universe. The player character is a cursor. It's what happens when an idea is larger than a gun. And _Wilds_ is a drunken knife fight, with the sun. Any other game will put a boson rifle in your hand, and, really, that would have been an intergalactic carnival. _Wilds_ gives you gravity itself, and it takes an entire game to wield this. + +Reading about _Wilds_ elsewhere gives me the impression that we're talking about the type of game that is intended to be played by those not versed in stock mainstream video games. The kind that are assailed after psychotic Americans pull a weekly. When made for such a person (the one who doesn't like games, not the mass murderer), the game is often made reductively easy to play and to win. Clearly I’m getting the wrong impression. _Wilds_ is not harsh, it just doesn’t care about you. It’s as indifferent to the player as the subjects described in all the Wikipedia articles the players will read afterwards to assimilate a modicum of knowledge about these, are. In _Wilds_ it’s tough to walk, jump and even look around. It’s so very driven by its physics, but also, as a consequence, by its lack of being very game-like at all. Very few elements snap, click or crack. Everything just sort of slides, floats, and flops around. This irked me to no end in the beginning. Feeling my own mastery of the player character's actions increases is how I bond (get stockholm syndrome) with a game. If _Wilds_ was gonna play like eating pizza with a hammer, I had some concerns about finishing the thing. I'm not gonna lie, in the beginning I didn't like it, and I only stuck it out because I thought it was a 3-4 hour experience. It's definitely bigger than that, though simply by being such a designed experience, a by necessity, finite experience. As I started to realise what I was getting into, I understood this wasn't a game that had failed at achieving sharp, eloquent controls. It was striving for something else entirely and telling me would have been spoiling the surprise. Before I could afford new consoles, I spent a great deal of time playing overlooked, often fan-translated, NES, and SNES games. Once you dig into the more arcane libraries, you realise how little video games have grown and how little they need modern controllers. Many of them are still (gameplay-wise) two-dimensional. Not so with _Wilds_. The core of the game is continuous, not discrete. Despite how little is done by the player from their perspective, the use of not one, but TWO analog sticks absolutely makes the experience. I guess some people use a mouse and a keyboard. The point is, an SNES version of this game wouldn't even be remotely close to achieving the same reactions as _Wilds_ does in its very reality inspired form. The more I think about it, the more I want to make this impossible SNES game. I think I see how. This isn't about that. That doesn't matter, the method of implementing my idea is taking shape as I write this. I'll keep it for myself (three days have passed since I wrote that. I was sober. Then drunk. Then hungover. It was a terribly uninspired idea. I would still play it if someone else did it, but I would know. I would IMMEDIATELY know how absolutely void of critical thought or inspirational light they were). So since it’s not very game-like, and if I get the impression that it’s not for gamers, shouldn’t these two parts spoon like an appropriately proportioned couple? A buddy of mine called it a Walking Sim in a non-disparaging manner. While I'm not quite sure how he mentally juggled those two perspectives (an (in my mind) derogative descriptor, and it being admirable), it really isn't. Movement is involved, and complex. It requires an enormous amount of spatial and temporal reasoning. The puzzles are esoteric and often non-euclidean. Every task asked to perform is contingent on a wealth of game experience in order to even be navigable, though in the Venn-diagram of experienced players and Hailey "who like, once tried the Flappy Birds", neither really has the prerequisite skills to actually solve the conundrums. Admittedly, me liking _Wilds_ oscillated immensely for each time I opened the game up. It seemed impenetrable in the beginning and certain puzzles were definitely made more troublesome than necessary by the game's inherent impression. Dropping it entirely was definitely on the table even about an hour before completing it, it was that frustrating. Then it dawned on me how the task at hand was a puzzle and not an exercise in aptitude, and I was able to reach an ending that a second buddy had described as quite good (I don't know what he said. He liked it, okay?). He was right. + +To my first buddy I would say "you mean Gone Home without all gay stuff?". _Wilds_ is Metroid Prime for people who roll their eyes at ice cream, though you can play it even if you like the sweet dessert. It's excellent. You get to actually discover ancient secrets not designed to combine the aesthetics of Gieger with the usability of Fisher-Price and the functionality of being a god damned fucking door. Cutting out the lawn-mowing of alien lifeforms (except your own), and the fitting of pegs into holes (ironically this is one of the few actions you perform besides Space Walking (that sounds like being a prost on the ISS (speaking of pegs and holes!))) really alleviates the dissonance apparent in most lore or story driven games not made by Kojima. This trait of letting you almost truly discover alien civilizations and puzzle out their secrets should not be forgotten. Creating it required Mobius Digital Games (their CEO is Masi Oka from Heroes, how weird is that?) to completely ignore the sensible choice of ever holding the player's hand. Yet if that’s what it took. This praise unfortunately makes the next criticism so much more annoying. Almost all information comes from log messages left behind, and though they're covered up as alien scribbles with an interesting linguistic and technological twist, they're log messages. I hate to invoke _The Return of the Obra Dinn_, but it showed us all how elegantly and not-in-conflict with the in-game universe, narrative exposition could be. It hurts, it really does, that _Wilds_ was not able to avoid conveniently left behind thoughts and commentary by those no longer among the living, at just the right time. And what an unfair criticism. Solving that problem for this game, feels like it would be an achievement every other game afterwards would copy faster than I can brew an exquisite cup of coffee for a friend, and then smugly await their praise, knowing full well that you’d have to be a social deviant to ever say anything but “mmm, sure is a good coffee”. Not that my coffee brewing technique, selection of beans, and manner of grinding aren't in a class of their own. It took me a long time to admit to myself, but the quality isn't imagined at all. I'm almost shaking now. I suddenly remembered someone asking for a drop of milk. That's just not right. Milk covers up the problems of bad coffee, it doesn't enhance the virtues of good coffee. Learn the difference. + +Before starting university a second time (of three) I took a trip to the city it was located in. We visited the school of architecture, and I was consumed with jealousy for my girlfriend. That place was overflowing with creative energy, and the promise of what its students were going to achieve. Afterwards we went to the university and wandered the halls and I couldn't help but feel disappointed in myself. I had wanted to enter the animation school. Having failed in creating an enticing portfolio twice, dropping out of university once, and being unemployed in the spring of 2009 (an unfortunate time to need a job in many places), I thought I might as well try studying Japanese. There was something stuffy and old about the university. It was a feeling I've later come to reminisce about, disappointed that the Asian Studies department was moved to a more modern, almost corporate, building later on, but during that little trip to the city, I found it off-putting. Fortunately the day was much improved afterwards. We ate lunch in the university park and watched some guys play some sort of soccer-based drinking game, and then strolled down the hill into a hip cafe area, drinking fancy coffee, and going to art supply shops. This was a big, and pretty city, for hip young people like me and my girlfriend. A few years later, uni was over, and I felt like I’d been everywhere over, and over, and over, again. It’s obvious why I would tie a place’s size to how much you know of it, and reciprocally, why it would seem almost unfathomably big when you know nothing of it. Naturally, games might be similar, and it is often why we move on to other games. Except, even when we move on, some things stay with us, leaving a feeling of not exactly being unexplored as much as still having stories to tell, that it will never reveal. How, and when this feeling is achieved (and it is something to achieve) I am not quite sure. It can be a bitter feeling. Sometimes I imagine a story has built itself up so that I will absolutely be told about the how’s and the why’s, but then in the end there was just nothing. Sometimes it’s an actual problem with the story, a plothole one might say. Sometimes, I need to look at myself and realize I was missing the point. And of course, sometimes, I got the point, but it wasn’t very profound, and they really should just have finished LOST like a normal story, they weren’t Dostoevsky (I’m not saying he wrote obtuse narratives, I’m saying he was profound and if he did write something a little cryptic, it wouldn’t have been forced, but to whatever point he was making). The ability to achieve a complete understanding of _Wilds_, is its most game-like feature. It is a book manuscript that the author printed without page numbers, and threw into the air. Eventually you’ll piece the book back together and it was actually The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Could _Wilds_ still be a game if you got all the way to Bowser’s Castle and then went “I still have no idea how jumping works''? I kind of know what the ludological answer is, but I really don’t want to say that _Final Fantasy XV_ is the _Infinite Jest_ of video games. + +_Wilds_ has no predeterminism, no sudden villain, no 'we took this form because your mind couldn't comprehend our actual form'. Hells bells, there isn't even any higher dimensionality. The last one would probably have been pretty cool in _Wilds_ (but also outside confirmed reality). So would time dilation (which I thought would be present), and Dark Matter. That's okay. Material for a sequel that'll hopefully never manifest. You don’t want a sequel to Little Miss Sunshine either, you know? Time dilation would actually solve a mechanical problem the game has, now that I think about it: Only want to try a single thing, but can’t because a bunch of stuff needs to occur beforehand? Take a nap near a black hole and watch time snail by at a breakneck pace. I’m not criticising _Wilds_ for not having this, I just thought the idea was fun. Those initial "doesn't have"s are meant as praise. I've certainly never written a science fiction story, but assume it must feel awfully good including the time travel paradox of "you tell me to go, cause I told you to tell me, cause you told me to…". Why else would it happen so often? Anyway, well done, writers, not only for writing a good story, but for performing what I assume must be delaying the purest sexual gratification a science fiction author can get? + +I read in a book about octopi that humans are unique because they think in terms of time. At least I think it was the octopus book. Might have been the book about time. We are always thinking about cause and effect. It’s how you solve every challenge in this game, how you formulate ideas for how to continue, and eventually it’s how you begin to see where everything is going. It’s even, sort of, where the fun in the game is. It’s in the in-between of not knowing and already knowing, that makes you go “oh, now I get it”. Really, the fun is gone after you “got” it. _Wilds_ also has you say “oh that’s really cool”, and saying that is pretty fun too. Yet about half way through it, I understood how this would end, and I knew it was how it had to be. I didn’t know every second for second how it would play out, but if you were to finish _Wilds_ and talk with me about it, you’d know what I mean. I’m being coy about it, because saying it outright is crude. It’s a question of scale. Of the game, and of the theme. It’s inherent in Wild’s reluctance to be game-like. It’s not actually specifically because of those convenient space emails. They are definitely symptoms, but even without them, this shape-like thought would still have formulated. In the very first paragraph I mentioned wine on a dress, but really, it’s a freckle. Freckles aren’t ugly, they’re just there. Occasionally they’re very cute. In this case it’s being told of how a friend’s friend looks. They’re red-headed, your friend says. Later on it dawns on you that your friend’s friend probably has freckles. Not that your friend’s friend was designed and cloned in a vat, but if they were, it would have been a little daring of your friend’s friend’s designers, to omit the freckles. + +Are you getting the sense that the problem I'm describing with _Wilds_ lies outside a conventionally fair point to make? Or that I'm just observing the tiniest possible issue with an electron microscope? Were this a review, it's the kind of notion that gets hidden in a box of extra thoughts, almost a pet peeve. Instead it's the only thing I can think about, constantly appearing and disappearing from my mind when I consider my time with _Wilds_. The minimalist internal mechanics of the player character, the universal mechanics of the game's reality, and the narrative that permeates the setting, are all building upon each other, overlapping and gesturing me towards a specific somewhere. Yes, I am outside what is conventionally worthy of praise or necessitates rebuke, but it is an overarching issue that will mortify as a trope, and eventually make those that came before _Wilds_ into involuntary self-parody. This isn't because _Wilds_ caused it, but when such a complete and thoroughly crafted experience does this, almost (I suspect) by default, it might be worth addressing, no matter how circuitously. + +I had brought my Nintendo 64 on a trip. It must have been somewhere around 2001. This was the last time I cared about one of those time looping games. I think it was an important birthday for one of my paternal grandparents, and we couldn’t make it home on the same day, so we were gonna stay at a hotel. This was definitely exciting to me. Hotels in Denmark are ludicrously expensive, and therefore, to my 12 year old me, they were good. To this day I probably haven’t stayed at a high quality hotel yet. Now that I think about it, saying something like that probably just outs me as a person who has yet to realize that a high quality hotel is an oxymoron. It seemed fancy at the time. _Majora’s Mask_ had been a frustrating journey, and a childishly disappointing one as well. I’d definitely hoped for Ocarina of Time 2. This was something else. I wish I’d been a discerning enough kid to realize that it meant something much, much better, but sadly, I wanted a big world, ten dungeons, and for that nail in the dick of a time loop to scram. The frustrating experience had been compounded because my brother and I had decided to complete it together, but there sure had been some misunderstandings about when to play, such that progression had been made in the absence of the other, and this inconsiderate behaviour had left some bitterness behind. My brother finished elementary school by doing the optional tenth grade at a sort of boarding school. This is normal in Denmark. These schools often have a specific focus, like an art curriculum. My brother’s school was about health and exercise. It had a running team, all punishment was dealt out in push ups and they went swimming in the ocean every morning, including all through winter. Him staying at this school might have been why I had brought the Nintendo 64. He wouldn’t have been able to continue playing if he was only at home once a month or every other month, but we had maybe picked him up for this birthday party. I must have reached the moon, ready to face off against Majora. The artstyle of this game, coupled with its melancholic setting, and subdued story all coalesce into an incredible ending. We didn’t have all the masks. We didn’t even have the Great Fairy’s Sword. This didn’t matter. This game was a league above its contemporaries (and successors?). Had I already finished it before this evening, and simply wanted to show the ending to my brother? Or had I held off finishing the journey until he could join in? Whatever the case, I remember how he didn’t really care. Not that anyone ever really knows what anyone is thinking, but to say that he is to me a black box with an effectively incomprehensible behaviour pattern, is apt. Maybe he felt betrayed that I had played without him. Or maybe he had just moved on from odd Japanese games towards a strict Counter-Strike 1.6-based diet. It's been twenty years since then and I haven't spoken to him for the last two. In fact it was Easter two years ago, so writing this during Easter means it's exactly two years ago. Where we are when we play things, feed into our play experience, and depending on the various factors in the game, also feed back out again. I don't know if I had had _Outer Wilds_ on my radar before, but after completing _The Return of the Obra Dinn_ together with my girlfriend in a one hundred percent cooperative manner, I was really hoping _Wilds_ would provide something similar. I wish we could have repeated the success, because I eventually had a great experience, but she fell asleep on my lap after twenty minutes and I don't blame her. _Wilds_ has no room for a co-pilot, neither in the spacecraft or in real life. We might not be able to do and redo the same events anywhere but in our mind, fermenting on our errors and constructing illusions of how else to have gone about things. Eerily similar situations happen. Not just as a déjà vu, but simply as everyday affairs. In order to handle life, it’s natural to construct patterns, heuristic solutions, when the same problems arise over and over. Life is not a time loop and doing this has made me cause pain to others. We change, and using the same words, thoughts, or behaviour to console or to be present, when people are sad or hurting, will make things worse. Because the loop becomes real, but only in yourself. You don’t see how the problem is no longer what it used to be, and you’re just predicting behaviour. When the problem hasn’t even changed, it’s even more hurtful. Acting ahead, to remedy a situation that hasn’t happened yet, but will, is disallowing others to express their pain, and they see the frustration in your eyes, when they realize you’re stuck in a loop of your own expectations. I am still in those phone calls with my brother two years ago, arguing, trying to make him see my side. Later my father calls. The problem is too abstract. I waited too many years to confront the issues, because I knew the result. I still know the result, and so I’m stuck in that memory of that evening after Easter. I’m thinking about the regret I will feel once it is too late, and trying to find a way out. A way back. Is this the same behaviour as I scolded myself for before? Perhaps partly. There are too many indicators of future behaviour for me to think it won’t happen again. I’m not talking about a heinous act or anything concretely abusive, but a thoroughly negligent, disregarding, and condescending behaviour, that no longer will affect just me. What a bitter, borderline spiteful choice to make out of a need to protect those I love and who depend upon me. That almost makes me sound like I’m trying to praise myself, when I’m actually saying I’m defaulting to behaviour that must seem to everyone else, childish, and to me, a damned shame. + diff --git a/drafts/Sasuga Keisatsu & Nordic Game Jam 2023.md b/drafts/Sasuga Keisatsu & Nordic Game Jam 2023.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..103e58c --- /dev/null +++ b/drafts/Sasuga Keisatsu & Nordic Game Jam 2023.md @@ -0,0 +1,28 @@ +

+ + +[_Sasuga Keisatsu_](https://takunomi.itch.io/sasuga/) + +We came to Nordic Game Jam 2023 with an idea: what if we made a real-time, grid-based Sin & Punishment-like, with a Vagrant Story-like upgrade system, narratively inspired by classic cop noir "Strømer" starring Jens Okking, using our own home-cooked 3D engine. Our success was palpable and terrifying. + +In 2000 there was a satirical game on the website for the Danish equivalent of the BBC, DR. It was called "Mujaffa spillet", and had you, in the guise of second generation Arab-esque immigrant driving down a street in your BMW, picking up gold chains and condoms (for fucking, of course). In between levels, you'd upgrade your vehicle with speakers and what not. It made me guffaw heartily. + +In 1992, LucasArts created X-Wing, and a year later they released TIE-Fighter. Suddenly you were the bad guys. + +What if… no. Wait. What if we created a sequel to Mujaffa spillet in the same vein as the X-Wing/TIE-Fighter duo, where we let you be the baddies? If the Arab homeboy was the good guy, I guess the bad guy would be… the cops? + +What if our game was a spiritual sequel to 1989 tv show "Een gang Strømer" ["Once a Cop"], which was itself a sequel to 1978 tv show "Strømer" ["Cop"]. Once a cop… always a cop. "... Altid Strømer." + +That idiom doesn't exist in Japanese, and by golly I need that Japanese twist. Sasuga Keisatsu means "As you would expect of police". + +I've been playing Sin & Punishment 2, Vagrant Story, and Fire Emblem Awakening. There are great lessons to learn from all these games, and mechanics that are woefully underexplored. I've already written about S&P. Vagrant Story is nothing short of painful to interact with today, but so worth the investment. The single-party, dynamic weapon attribute system and Metroid-like RPG setting is revelatory. I don't know if I can improve on what Matsuno has already improved on, but I was gonna use it. Fire Emblem and Advance Wars for GBA have the most pleasant cursor navigation. It should be worshipped. I worship it. + +That was a lot of influences at once. We sat down. We had whisky. For three days we coded, composed, cursed, and painted pixel art. It was my least social Nordic Game Jam ever. I wanted to see if this idea could work. + +The lore heavy, satirical cop noir story got sidelined, but we ended up with a shmup-y, almost Doom-like action game, where a cute food had to be sawed in half by your shotgun. A shotgun you could dynamically upgrade with pickups that looked like the enemies. I even had my retired cop-dad do voice over for the 100 % authentic experience. + +I like this game a lot. I like it a lot more than I expected. I've blasted through it so many times already. Of the games I've worked on, it is by far the most satisfying game to play. We're definitely making more of it. + +As for Nordic Game Jam, it's a fun event. The food has really gotten an overhaul this year, and I enjoyed every meal immensely. I don't want to be mean, so I won't delve into the talks. The final presentation format still seems inadequate to me. It works for a loud, stupid game like Sasuga Keisatsu, but for quiet, contemplative, sad, or scary games, I feel like dedicated presentations would still be better. + +Submissions I liked were the smart [_Bac-flip_](https://03gle.itch.io/bacflip), the beautiful [_The D'Illest Wizard_](https://twitwi.itch.io/the-dillest-wizard), the ambitious [_Lumigro_](https://multihandicap.itch.io/lumigro), the moist [_Sponge_](https://hottieman.itch.io/press-to-squeeze). I really want to try more of them. Looking through the submissions, I've really missed out on a bunch. diff --git a/drafts/Simplicity (Sin and Punishment: Successor to the Skies).md b/drafts/Simplicity (Sin and Punishment: Successor to the Skies).md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..fecfd47 --- /dev/null +++ b/drafts/Simplicity (Sin and Punishment: Successor to the Skies).md @@ -0,0 +1,21 @@ +


+ + +The best Mario game is _Super Mario Galaxy 2_. One of its great achievements (and _Super Mario Galaxy_ does this as well (but 2 is better)) is that you don't have to control the camera. You can reset it, but Wii games weren't designed around dual analog sticks, so most games made do without it. _Super Mario Galaxy 2_ didn't "make do." It made gold, diamonds, and bitches. + +Controlling your viewport in a game is kinda weird. It's necessary in a lot of games, but isn't itself gamified. It's mostly neither interesting nor fun, though we buy expensive mice to make us better at it, and pity those who can't use the auxiliary stick for camera movements on consoles. _GoldenEye_ and _Perfect Dark_ were crowning achievements of their time, and when the PlayStation game _Medal of Honor_ tried to use the second joystick to control the camera, they were laughed at. Yet somewhere between _Timesplitters_ and _Halo_, it became the norm, and suddenly positioning the camera was now a collaboration between developers and the player. + +When _Super Mario Galaxy 2_ doesn't ask you to take charge of the camera, it is luxurious. The developers are saying no no, we got this, you just have fun. When else could game makers afford you this modicum of comfort? There's probably a lot of people with negative associations to this line of thought because they remember when it went terribly wrong. Back when survival horror was mostly scary because you had to wrangle which direction was forward, every time you moved 3.28 feet. _Super Mario Galaxy 2_ should have obliterated this anxiety. The beautiful movement you could achieve in this (often non-euclidean) space was so much more complex than what you were only trying to do before. So once again: when else could the creators take it upon themselves to say don't worry fella, we'll handle the camera, you do the murder. (That's mostly what we do in games right?) + +Someone got there before me. Well, a lot of people did, though I think they took a different route. Do they realise what they achieved or were they having too much fun and economic failure to stop and contemplate? Classifying a game as "on-rails" often brings a wealth of associations, but the clearest is the Wii version of the super aggressive Mr. Potato Head simulator, _Dead Space_. Though me and the then-future mother of my children did have fun with it, it was definitely missing most of what made the original interesting (_Dead Space Prime_ isn't actually all that). On-rails has come to mean less, hampered, simplified. + +_Sin & Punishment: Successor to the Skies_ made me buy a new dictionary… at gunpoint. + +We control a young lad or lassie, using their laser guns to tear through a hundred billion robots, mutants, bad spirits, big fish, and magical boys and girls. Incoming fire can be instantly dodged, and sometimes reflected (using a sword!). You as the player are on-rails-ily propelled through each stage at maximum velocity. Yet you still retain an impressive amount of movement freedom at each target gallery (move up, down, left, and right). Sometimes the player character moves down the z-axis (y?) and here we see the achievement: the player gets to have a full 3d experience, without having tinkering with the camera. + +Sure it's a simplification compared to other games. Sure some games had already done this. You know what though? This feels amazing. This game feels so good and fires at such a murderous pace, that what is sacrificed in useless freedom, is returned many times over in military-grade, laboratory developed rampage. + +Lemme just say: _Metroid Prime_. That was a fully 3D, first-person action game, where the camera control was part of the fun, and not something dumped on you by the developers. And in order to give you this gift of pleasant, meaningful, tangible camera control, the game contains none the unbridled madness of _Sin & Punishment_. It is clean, it is calculated, it is so god damn deliberate. I'm not gonna make this a two-part text where I suddenly switch to _Metroid Prime_. I just realised there is beauty in having the developers take care of the camera. It affords such freedom in the game design. Yet the opposite path is clearly possible as well, where potentially enormous amounts of time are dedicated to making the camera control frictionless, but an integral and joyful part of the experience. Greedily I start thinking… How could you do both? + +Describing something as "the thinking man's…" implies it is of a normally stupid ilk, but this thing requires you to think to enjoy it. Sometimes the implication is that it is therefore superior. Sometimes more boring. Often it means the person describing it is bad at the wordy-words and has to rely on describing x as like y but with brain/gun/sex/gay. The other end of the spectrum is a person exclaiming I don't want to think when I do that thing that I do. This time the implication is that relaxing is enjoying something stupid, because then you don't have to think. As always, let us consider _Die Hard_, the Ur Something Stupid. I always bring up _Die Hard_ because it is not stupid at all. The writers, director and whoever else, did the thinking for you, so you could enjoy something simple, but cool. Simple is not easy, but they made it look like it was. They made it look so easy that everyone thought it was easy, and so everyone got lazy, and now we have this shithole. I don't need to recommend _Sin & Punishment: Successor to the Skies_. It's an old game and you can get it however you like. It is on the other hand, the _Die Hard_ of video games, so you would be less if you didn't play it. + diff --git a/drafts/Slowing Down This Exact Moment Somewhere in The Past (Grindstone).md b/drafts/Slowing Down This Exact Moment Somewhere in The Past (Grindstone).md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f3ca318 --- /dev/null +++ b/drafts/Slowing Down This Exact Moment Somewhere in The Past (Grindstone).md @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +It is the impossibility of seeing anything with absolute clarity. When you’re asked to recall a moment in your childhood you weigh the appropriateness of the story with the age of the recipient, shuffling through a hipster’s vinyl record collection worth of memories, discarding categories of humorous violence and childish crudeness, constantly connecting words of conversations long forgotten, with smells of recurring situations, bringing with them cascades of other scenes. You are never in one places at any one time, always travelling along edges and nodes of, splitting off into two, seven and three other directions, shifting focus mid-word, because something was funny, sad, profound, related, of equal amounts, inappropriate, you’re drunk, a moment of a muscle, or a play between many actors resulting in something that will never happen again, so you have to go along now or reflect on what might have been. Of course that wouldn’t have happened, since in the blinking conversation, too many elements are lost to mourn any single one. It is only in the physical space of going somewhere that the many tunnels of everywhere seem to align themselves in such a way that the appropriate patterns finally emerge, and you’re able to, for only the length of a short walk, reflect. As if every single event of a single day decided to appear in front of you, neatly arranged in such a way that you understand the pointlessness of regret. That which you still desire, or have long since given up on. The many choices that were taken with too little information at hand, rashly in order to get somewhere you would still have to wait. All that would so surely be and never were, those things that would never happen, and didn’t, and the way that the vastness of unseen time shrouded everything in such a way that the most obvious next instance could somehow come creeping closer, caped in a raucous billboard. The chorus of a manifold voice is speaking with you plainly, chiding you for the little victories, while the inverse voice is beckoning you to think, strategies on how you might reach a place that ceased to be a long time ago. Almost inaudible, an echo chimes in to remind you that all of these are good. The blinking, the measuring, every little insecurity, and all the certainties are still here, part of what is. Even those fading ones, when you know with a total conviction it would never be covered or left behind, their gradual transparency carry with them a worth, not comparably greater, yet still immeasurably equal, had they always remained, clear as the universality they didn’t become, and not beautifully already withering as the temporality you should have realized in that exact moment it would always be. + +Sitting in a hostel in Kyoto around a week or so before the Tohoku earthquake I was rewatching a video on Vimeo of some people from _Capybara Games_ discussing their new game _Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP_. What was this game? How did it play? It looked so unique, the music was a bit scary but also very enthralling. It was gonna be playable on a device that was the actual future in your hand, but in the actual present. I was in a city representing the very idea of culture, in a land all about mixing fantastic aesthetics with the most interesting, newest technology, and porn was literally everywhere. That last part wasn’t really related, it just surprised me how ubiquitous the stuff was. It was incredible to hear these guys talk about _Sworcery_. They were really honest about what they were doing, yet were also really trying not to give it all away. It was about a month from release at the time I was watching the video, and the hype got to me so bad. Since then, so many devs have unapologetically ripped off the _Superbrothers_ twig-pixel-man style. Not a lot have tried to be what the game was. Mobile gaming wasn’t what it was today. It wasn’t really anything yet. It was ripe for doing whatever the fuck you wanted. _Capy_ sure did. Back when Lost was airing its second or third season, I thought it was really interesting that the number of firearms on the show was super scarce. Every gun mattered, and became not just a tool for shootouts, but a symbol of power. Hell, every bullet mattered. Being a super dull person, I thought “what if games did that”. _Sworcery_ sorta did something like that with its battles. What are there, seven or eight mandatory battles? They’re simplistic, and a bit repetitive, but feel great, and narratively they carry a lot of weight. Also, you grow more and more sick and frail as the game progresses. It’s inverse Zelda. Honestly I did kinda want _Sworcery_ to be a lot more. A lot more content. A lot more Zelda too. My hype prevented me from being disappointed, but I definitely was. I now realize I was a moron. _Sworcery_ was so much better and so much more than we’ve gotten since then. It might have been the best that mobile games have ever been (in certain aspects). To not have been as hyped, but also to more easily have understood what _Sworcery_ was, I should a) definitely have finished season two of Twin Peaks, and b) believed the _Capy_ chaps when they were trying to tell us what the game was and wasn’t, in that video. Even when you fundamentally, apparently, misunderstand what someone is telling you, that doesn’t mean you don’t appreciate the conversation. Learning about and playing _Sworcery_ was having a conversation while drunk, in a language you speak poorly, about a topic you know nothing about. There was a lot to talk about. A lot about what became and what didn’t + +Around 2010 I played too much Might & Magic: _Clash_ of Heroes. I had moved across the country (it’s a small country, it wasn’t really that far) and with every train trip back and forth, my DS became more and more permanently attached to my hands. A year later I moved to another city, with my hands now perfectly resembling an iPod-white clam-shell gaming device developed in Kyoto, city of vegan chiptune restaurants and ancient, overcrowded shrines and temples. I wouldn’t know that last part until a year later. My newly mutated hands were perfect for playing _Clash_. The following experience has since then become my go-to way of telling if I’ve played a game too much (the hands eventually returned to their original shape). Playing a game that much, is so dissonant with my life anno 2020, that I’m having a hard time even recalling how I did it. How did I (kinda) attend uni, (kinda) maintain a social life, and (absolutely) devour that game? After waterboarding myself in hot, steaming pixel art, and ingenious game design for over a week, I got sick and had a wild ride of a fever. Not unlike when I over-indulged in Puzzle Bubble a couple of years before, in high school, all I could see were the patterns of lining up soldiers to activate powerful arcane units, and stacking magically appearing, and overlapping fences. The fever exaggerated this effect: I would imagine complex situations, units standing in numerous positions, and contemplate how to react, and counteract with every possible action. It made my head spin, so I had to sleep, but in my fevered dreams, the colors and patterns were still those of elfs and little knights fusing and chaining into more powerful constellations. The fever broke, I woke up. I abandoned the game. A few years later a buddy of mine discovered _Clash_ and so I went back in, controlled myself, and finished the story. Many wonderful multiplayer skirmishes followed. There was something so wrong with this game. The story and dialogue were too good for what was almost a tie-in game, and the game design was the kind of simplicity that makes me go “surely this has been done already” ( and subsequently, “smack my bitch up, somehow, it’s a first!”). Other examples in that category of ought-to-have-been-done-but-have-not are _Threes_, _Baba is You_, and _Petal Crash_. Fortunately, _Capybara Games_ used to be quite active in talks and presentations, so they’ve told us how much time they laboured over _Clash_, back when it was still called Little Big Battle, how it used to be real-time, and how they worked with Ubisoft to make it a Might & Magic game. If you spent a few seconds thinking about it, of course the game didn’t come about on it’s own, and of course no one had done this before. Even with Puzzle Quest before it (and Gyromancer releasing a month before, but that’s hardly time to act on inspiration), _Clash_ was definitely a new, and wondrous type of experience. Something to treasure and put on a pedestal. To go back to and think “how”, and “more please”. It’s a classic case of more than the sum of its parts. Sure it’s a strategic puzzle game with RPG elements and an engrossing narrative. It’s just a few years before also having unnecessary crafting and a superfluous skill tree. _Clash_ is so finely balanced (and even a bit more balanced in its HD re-release) and fine-tuned for a maximum amount of good feelings. It’s making a new friend, messaging said friend, who immediately sees and replies, wittingly, earnestly, and thoughtfully. It works in singleplayer, it works in multiplayer. One mode does not feel like it came before the other. It is what puzzle games could strive for, and what they never really were again after that. I suppose much of what I praise _Clash_ for, became the good parts of all those deck building games. Except _Clash_ wasn’t dependent on some careless design idea like “your units are actually cards”. Its units were physical parts of the world, and despite them waiting around like good little JRPG teen warrior wizards, there is a completeness to the way all the elements of _Clash_ fits together, that doesn’t need some cheap abstraction like “you’re building a deck of cards”. The DS cartridge is the full experience (arguably the Steam release you ought to buy when you’re done reading this is the full release plus). + +Ten years after hallucinating my way through a fever, matching bears and pixies into treants and druids, I found myself in some seaside town of Poland. Between endless time-bartering sessions, using a currency I wasn’t in possession of, selling stuff I wasn’t in control of, to people who must have known the pointlessness of the entire exercise, I escaped into my phone. If your hair isn’t still dripping wet from placenta juice, you remember that phones used to be shit. They’re incredible now, and testaments to incredible wasted potential. A device of such magnitudes of things never achieved, is the perfect platform for a game as vapid and full of nothingness as Legends of _Solgard_. This game is the unwanted, accidental, and abandoned hate-spawn between a patron eldritch horror of uninspiredness, and a man who masturbates to spreadsheets. I played it ferociously, every break I got, for three days. I then threw it away, like a man who realises mid-bite in a MacDonald’s that he is eating a patty of burned cardboard semen. Coincidentally, I was once again ill (planes are disease incubators). This time I didn’t have a fever, but it didn’t exactly improve the situation either. It’s incredibly boring to try and recap what has happened in video games between _Clash_ and _Solgard_ (that was my first draft). Suffice to say, _Solgard_ is the final scene of There will be Blood. It’s a huge, magnificent, empty mansion where an insane old, white guy lives. Traditionally, a game can’t commit acts of violence, but it’s likely that someone at King.com once beat a man to death with a bowling pin, carving his skull open like a ripe watermelon. Metaphorically of course. Or whatever. It’s a flowery way of saying that _Solgard_ takes something beautiful, and though it makes it absolutely shittingly addictive, it also twists and breaks _Clash_ into a symbol of its own opposite. It is the uruk-hai to the Elves. I could go on for pretty long, taking a massive dump on _Solgard_, and anyone involved. This is crazy behaviour for a multiplicity of reasons. There’s really no reason to care. The game objectively plays more pleasantly than _Clash_. And finally, while I haven’t been inside the satanic quantum gravitational reactor core that spawned this game, in a previous life, I did stare into a similar Ba’al Engine. Clearly people work on something like this for many reasons, and they are just normal humans, and we can’t all create ingeniously designed toys that reinvent what a genre can be. And while I certainly didn’t worship the Dark Lord of that Machine in my former life, I was also not not part of the whole... coven, as peripheral as that involvement might have been. And even though I’d brought my Switch to Poland, loaded with that absolutely oversized demo of Dragon Quest XI, I mostly played _Solgard_ after frying my brain all day long. It felt good. Activating the familiar combinations, getting hits in, summoning reinforcements. It retained the best parts of _Clash_ to such an extent that playing a game that was in most regards far better, became a herculean mental Labour. The real tragedy of _Solgard_ is the one concerning what this game might have been. This entire text is evidence that few others would have appreciated a good _Solgard_ as much as me, and I certainly did try to extract those specific areas from it, trying with all my mind to simply ignore the parts I knew were actually there to exploit the players. Also, for some reason it’s perfectly acceptable to take a break by pulling out your phone and playing something one-handed. Apparently it gives off the same vibes as texting, and for that I appreciate _Solgard_ for allowing moments of respite, which really were needed. _Solgard_ isn’t the only trajectory for how puzzle games could evolve from _Clash_. With any luck, some years from now, perhaps a more human-friendly ideology develop in mobile games. Like all things in that sphere, it’ll be driven by greed, but in field as inconsequential as mobile games, if the ends and means are just, I can’t say I care if the motive is synonymous with a villain from Fullmetal Alchemist. + +When I was 4-5 years old, I'd watch my older brother play DooM on some ("Donatello…") DOS machine. It ran Norton Commander, and was mesmerizing. Why did he have a computer in his room? A year later we moved, didn't bring it, and from then on newer computers were in the living room or basement. The next day I would draw the level overlay maps and the grown-ups would comment and praise me. DooM is cool. DooM is so insanely cool that even today, most games seem rudimentary next to its brutality. Shotgun-shell-meets-Zombieman is a crystallized moment of what feels fantastic in video games. Replaying it on Switch on a hundred billion inch TV with big-butt wall-mounted Bowers & Wilkins speakers, and an oversized amplifier, I realize, perhaps a bit late, that DooM is exceedingly violent. In fact, I would have certain qualms playing it in front of MY currently 4 years old son. My dad’s explanation of the situation in 1993/94 was as follows: + +“Hah. I didn’t give two shits what you boys played.” + +My father is the greatest man who ever lived. Not because of that, but it didn’t detract any points either. Despite these thoughts of the influence of violence, I sure did play a lot of _Grindstone_ in front of the boy. The enemies are clearly sentient, occasionally scared, and they sure do get absolutely ripped apart. One unfortunate is even, post-battle, pummelled apart. He can be kissed out of existence, but I didn’t realize this the first time (or I really wanted to beat the snot out of him). What to translate the enemy names into was quite the challenge as well. Some are called Jerks, which is just such a fantastically chosen word. It’s sort of storytelling. I imagine it’s the insane player character who calls them jerks. It’s sort of a meta-term, in that it’s probably something a lot of players would use to refer to these enemies as anyway, since they sure are a bunch of jerkwads. It even solves a second storytelling issue, as any in-universe lore term would be sort of cringy to say aloud, and the _Capy_ lads probably didn’t want to go down that particularly nerdy alley, in a game about intelligently executing a mountainous genocide. Problem with “jerk” is how English or rather American it is. It’s a pejorative, but a (I believe) mild one. All the same, it’s really punchy (pully? (JERKY?)), on par with “fuck”, but, as noted, not as offensive. Finding a word in my native language that fits so nicely into that space is basically impossible. The literal translation misses some of the connotations and isn’t succinct at all. Anything that is pleasant to say, is definitely more offensive, and though I don’t really care which words my boy goes around say, it does get a teensy bit annoying when he finds a particular love for that one massively offensive word around dinner time. Some of the thoughts that helped shape _Grindstone_ were apparently already there at the time of _Clash_, but as far as puzzle games go, _Grindstone_ is almost a different genre. No more playing with a buddy, it’s a seemingly endless cavalcade of butchery and gem-collecting, with a control setup originally designed specifically for those ever so disappointing touchscreen devices. On the Switch they developed a new control scheme that is, almost by definition, a tad forced. It works really well though, but is one of those traits that tell us what happened in gaaaaaming in the last couple of years. _Grindstone_ has no story, no conversations, no exploration. You ascend a vertical map of nodes representing levels, use your loot to buy or restock equipment, and that’s it. I can’t deny that from a certain point of view, it’s a purer experience than having experience points, and an expansive narrative. Being developed (in utmost secrecy) for a smartphone before a console, probably had this influence. Maybe not. I still haven’t played _Capy_’s previous work, Below. Does it have a skill tree? It is a roguelike, so they can’t exactly claim they are free from a Zeitgeist of the Boring (though Below was in development for so long that maybe they started before it was passé). Maybe _Grindstone_ would have been the exact same game had it initially released on PS4 or Switch. I’m guessing no. _Capy_ has marinated their little hatred simulator in smartphone sauce and ginger. What probably saved _Grindstone_ from being an actual smartphone game (I say that with all the implied vitriol you can imagine), was that some corporation was willing to let them release it on their premium game service, and so there are no vestigials of what normally comes from being a matching game on mobile. It’s kind of beautiful. The exact design that makes these games excellent money machines for assholes, is what makes the game an experience that’s been reduced to its purest essence. That vertical level selection map is so essentially that of a mobile game, that it's interesting to give it some extra thought. So much game design was created for console and computer experiences, but in the last ten years, new thoughts are developed for mobile. Not many of these are brought back to console though, but here we see this degenerated version of the Super Mario Bros. 3 map that was designed to make mobile games as casual an experience as possible being brought back completely unashamed. Calling it pure a few sentences ago was a way of really trying to see the bright side of the way games are on mobile. A way of trying to not be the guy who says “mobile games aren’t real games”. _Grindstone_ definitely is a real game. It’s great breadth and depth. It’s not trying to nickel and dime anyone. Yet for all my praise, I haven’t finished _Grindstone_. I don’t think I’m even close to doing all the levels. That vertical map is a tool. It’s a tool to present countless, slightly changing levels in some other way than a simple list of names. It tells you how much you get for free, and is just involved enough to feel like a game without making you feel like a neeeerd. The vertical map turns out to have a different effect when the game is no longer an exercise in secretly exploiting people. Even though it doesn’t look like a to-do list, it does feel like the prettiest to-do list ever. At least after some eighty levels or so. From the classic console game perspective, without a compelling meta game or narrative of any sort, the map serves no point, and from the mobile phone direction, if the game isn’t trying to enthrall you to eventually get something out of you, trying to constantly remind you how much you’re getting for your buck, becomes more of a weight on your shoulders than feature. When I played _Baldur’s Gate 2_ I accidentally did this to myself by accepting and not completing an indian train carriage worth of subquests. So yeah, I don’t really feel done with _Grindstone_, but I kinda just want it to be some twenty or thirty fantastic levels, and then a random slash infinite mode. + +My god. Did I get filtered by a god. Damn. Filthy. Casual game, for being too abundant? + +It sure is an interesting evolution to see what psychotic, money-lovin’ dick-barf-drinkers in San Francisco (or wherever these kinds of mobile games were first invented) can make real, but the world map/level selection in SMB3 on a darned NES was apparently still the best choice for a good game experience, and _Clash_ adding a bit of story on top might have diluted the purity of the game a bit, but it didn’t hurt the experience either. Doesn’t make _Grindstone_ a bad game at all though, it might just be beneficial to consider where we’re drawing our influences from, and whether those influences are worth assimilating into the medium in general. + +_Grindstone_ is drawn in _Capy_’s “episode of Adventure Time where PB has soon-to-rupture gangrene” artstyle, similar to the cartoons for Super Time Force. It is clean, legible to an extreme degree, kinda nauseating, and probably the best choice for today’s divine displays of very small pixels, if you’re doing a 2D game, have talent, a budget, and a good sense of design. All that said, I don’t really like it. Gory stuff is fun and cathartic, but I don’t really like the “flat-shaded, lumpy characters with goofy faces”. It feels like something I often see in recent cartoons. That’s a cop out explanation. I could just say I find it ugly, plain, and impersonal. I have to admit that because I’m about to say I wish the game was drawn with the same great low-resolution pixel characters that _Clash_ or Timeforce were drawn in, and is there really anything more unoriginal than doing low resolution pixel art in 2020 (roguelike with deckbuilding?)? That might be the most nit-picky I get in this text, but I’m sure someone made a chart that shows how nit-picking is both proportional and inversely proportional to the quality of something. + +The most basic, build-it-with-legos-paper-prototype version of _Grindstone_ is of the player painting a line of homicidal intent in a specific type of “Creep of Color”. Kill enough CoCs, and you can kill a Jerk. This reduces your Kill Count, but you can switch to a different ethnicity, keep the chain going and attempt to increase the Kill Count again to kill another Jerk, and so on. It is Words with Friends, where no one is your friend, there is no talking, in a game that’s actually fun, designed by video game auteurs, simplified enough for common schlubs, but worthy of the time from the truly sophisticated connoisseur, who only plays video games with a glass of 16 year old, single cask Laphroaig next to them. + +Doing well in _Grindstone_ is a prerequisite for getting any dopamines from the experience. The minimal interaction isn't enough to get any feel-good vibes, but it tickles you to try a little harder. No matter how plain that observation is, don't forget that mobiles strive to make sure that you either don't need to do well, or hardly even need to interact in order to feel like a champ. It's you who is observing the patterns in _Grindstone_, you who executes the plan. The short chains might come cheaply, but planning a route through a sea of creeps and executing upon it isn't. That feeling is earned. The inherent benefit of doing well in a game like this, is that you also feel a little bit smart for seeing hidden patterns in the chaos. Once you’re done with _Grindstone_, the next game to play isn’t _Clash_ or god forbid, Bejeweled. It’s Into the Breach. The similarities could fill a second text this size, but one great, and similar, design choice I’d like to point out, is that both games are very deterministic, save for one detail: In Breach, the buildings you so desperately try to defend might occasionally repel damage with a randomly activating shield. You can’t count on it, but it’s wonderful when it happens. In the same manner, bifurcating a Jerk will catapult a gemstone onto the playing field, crushing a random Creep. The gem is valuable afterwards, and is another object that’ll let you switch which ethnicity you’re murdering, so the random location it lands on is truly blessed. This trait of being widely deterministic, but then still showing random gestures of kindness is a great little mechanic. + +In Tim Rogerseseses’s _Dissidia Final Fantasy NT is Like Doing Your Taxes on The Moon_ video, he lauds it for being overdesigned. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone else talk about something being over designed, and especially not in a positive sense. It’s wonderful. Most game developers, especially the more chatty independent ones, love to praise the virtues of minimalism and simplicity, maybe citing Fumito Ueda’s _Subtracting design_ method (GDC, 2004). Indirectly, this tells of a distaste for many things Japanese Role-Playing Game wise. _Clash_ was perhaps one of the only overdesigned puzzle games. You prepared your team before starting, numbers weren’t exactly minimal, characters had many aspects not immediately visually evident. Perhaps most interesting, was that there was so much information, you even had to hold down a button. during matches, to see an overlay with additional information. On the one hand, it would be more clean if this wasn’t necessary, and on the other I really enjoy having many aspects to consider at same time, so such an overlay adds delightful complexity. _Grindstone_ as noted (did I note this?) has far fewer levers to pull and buttons to push (that’s not a pun on initially being touchscreen-only). Neither the player character (his name is JORJ! That’s great!) nor the creeps and jerks, really have any additional information about them, hidden away in some invisible layer of far eastern tactical game design philosophy. Still, _Grindstone_ does have enough supplementary yet vital information, that a _Danger Overlay_, like the one in _Clash_, becomes necessary. It’s not like the mechanic means anything to me on a nostalgic level, but it still speaks to me. As if someone might be saying “simple stuff is cool, but, you know, sometimes it’s nice being a little fancy”. + +I left Kyoto on the 9th or 10th of March, 2011. Tokyo had been cool and overwhelming. I’d walked too much in the days I was there, to see too many sights. I’ve always wanted to go back to experience it far more leisurely. It’s doubtful I’ll get the time now. Fortunately, after ten intense days in Tokyo, I went to Kyoto and explored the city with just that attitude. I loved my days in the city. Loved them so much I changed my plans and came back later. A girl in my year at university had scored higher marks on her test and had gotten to go to a university in Kyoto for the semester abroad. I had to attend a university in Akita prefecture. That’s another story, but I’ll always think back with a certain amount of contempt on this girl who got one of the two spots for the university in Kyoto, and never even went. There are a lot of what-if moments in life, and to most of them I can say: I don’t care, I like what the end result was, despite a journey that I definitely didn’t appreciate at the time. There are moments I truly appreciated in the journey that didn’t include me living half a year in that ancient city, but, c’mon! It was gosh darned Kyoto. City of vegan chiptune restaurants! In comparison to Kyoto, Osaka seemed downright filthy. It probably wasn’t, my expectations had just become a bit skewed. The other hostels had been these cool, hip places where beautiful tourists from Canada and Sweden gathered, and shared their stories of fun stuff they’d done. The Osaka hotel was in a creepy highrise with unpleasant fluorescent lights and staff that didn’t quite wanna be there. I don’t remember meeting another guest. Later on I got a much better impression of Osaka and all it had to offer (Lemme tell you: Ame-mura. That was later though). We just got off on a rough start. Me and my travel buddy walked around the downtown area, scouting decent coffee shops. We went to _Den Den Machi_ which was a bit of a disappointment. Walking home that evening I remember feeling so very tired and cold. We stopped at what I remember as a Chococro. Once again, I was sick. It would appear that trains are also disease incubators. It wasn’t gonna be fun getting back to the hotel with a fever going full force. My fevers are always really bad. Intense sweating, nightmares, feeling super cold while burning. The next day my buddy met up with a friend of ours. I think they went to the aquarium (I went a couple of years later. It was fantastic). On his way back to the hotel, he told me, he thought he might have gotten sick as well, since everything suddenly started shaking. At the same time, I was thinking my fever was a bit worse than usual. + +The next month was weird. At some point, me and my travel buddy arrived in Hiroshima. It’s a famous city, but I feel like more people ought to know about the modern day Hiroshima. It definitely has a unique flavour. Our hostel of choice was once again a nice place to stay. We ran into a couple of soldiers from our own country. They’d gotten a huge load of money from being in Afghanistan and decided to travel around Asia. Knowing how to read the Japanese characters for “okonomiyaki” and “nomihoudai” makes your travels in Japan a lot more fun, so I’d like to claim we made the rest of their journey a lot better, even though we only went out drinking with them that one evening. The next night I was sitting in the common area of the hostel. There was one other dude, an American. He told me his bosses were pissed at him. He wasn’t supposed to have left Tokyo, but he was pretty scared about what might happen in Fukushima. Apparently he was a (the?) lead tech guy on the new engine for a long running, world-renowned Japanese role-playing game franchise. There was a lot he couldn’t discuss, but he was pretty open about how tired he was of the corporate BS, and how he was sure they really wanted to fire him, but couldn’t. I’m pretty sure I recognized him in one of the promotion trailers they released a bit before the game the engine was developed for was actually released, a few years later. Part of why I liked that game was definitely what he had been part of. I didn’t meet him again after that. His personality was pretty off-putting that evening, but it was nice to have a conversation, while sober, in a language I had a good grasp of, about something I cared about. diff --git a/drafts/Starting the Day Playfully.md b/drafts/Starting the Day Playfully.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..80874b7 --- /dev/null +++ b/drafts/Starting the Day Playfully.md @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +

+ + +Having so little time to play games recently, I’ve been thinking about how I might make a shorter play time feel just as satisfying. + +It could be about habits. One habit I like, is that I like to read before I sleep. Gaming just before bed wakes me up (the bright screens and all). Another habit is that the first thing I do every morning is to make a sleep-deprived bloody sacrifice to the God of Black Liquid and Caffeine. The minutes I spend grinding beans and brewing, wakes me up. It’s meditative and yet filled with antificipation. + +This is a very short time span though, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if a tiny, miniscule play session could be inserted while I drink the coffee, and help me prepare for the day? + +I think a good game for waking up in the morning would have to either give me energy, lightly exercise my mind, or set the mood. It would also have to be satisfying in very short bursts, without the possibility of giving me a sour day if something fails. + +The last bit might be a question of willpower, but it’s probably a good idea to at least try and use a game without a low chance me making me mad for the first hour or two after I leave the apartment. + +Candidates for me, would be Animal Crossing: New Leaf, or some JRPG where I just try to walk a little bit in the game, maybe do one or two battles and really enjoy them, or some offlife MMO-like game where I could just do one simple hunt. + +A game like Picross 3d: Round 2 might be a great idea as well. It’s sort of trivial, and yet feels like it’s working the brain muscles. Damnit though, I want to go on a an adventure! + +I think I’m gonna try with Etrian Mystery Dungeon though. I’ve had this for a few months and havn’t found the right time to really dig into it. Had to finish the Tactics Ogre, you know. Tactics Ogre, huh? That would’ve been a good one as well. Etrian Mystery Dungeon seems to have a nice balance between party-preparation and some simple puzzle-like combat sessions, that I could try and restrain myself to just a cup of coffees worth in time. Let’s see how my mornings feel in a few weeks. diff --git a/drafts/Switch and Cartridge-Based Apps.md b/drafts/Switch and Cartridge-Based Apps.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..857691e --- /dev/null +++ b/drafts/Switch and Cartridge-Based Apps.md @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ + + +Cartridges seem to be a thing of the past, and yet for a few reasons, I’m enarmoured with how the Switch is trying to bring them back. + +From a technical standpoint, it’s the only way. Can’t really cram a fullsized blu-ray disc into a handheld. And going full digital with no physical media is too Apple, even for Nintendo. + +The good reasons, for us as gamers though, builds on my the switch isnt just nintendos new handheld, it’s the first real gaming tablet-theory. + +This probably sounds either obvious or completely pretentious, but I think it’s really hard to truly appreciate something that you don’t physically own. There are only a select few apps on the app store that I truly appreciate. Some because of my very specific likens that brought me to them, some because they are just so damned good, and a single one because it’s no longer available legally, so it’s just mine. + +Yet there are also quite a collection that I should appreciate far more than I do, and one of the reasons is that they are just ephemeral programs on my little computer, conceptually no different than the calculator or clock programs. And this is sad. Good games should have some way of standing out and buy into them with my time and money, I want to feel like the game is worthy of investing in, with my real free time, not just toilet breaks or waiting in line at the grocery store. + +Mobile games are now mostly designed like that, and it isn’t good for games and it isn’t good for people who truly enjoy investing themselves in games that require time and skill. + +So here comes the Nintendo Switch, a gaming tablet with a very (tablet-wise) unique and profoundly retro solution to giving each game a respectful spotlight: What if the apps came in little physical cartridges that you insert into the tablet to play, and if the cartridges were bought in rather pretty boxes you could line up on your bookself? + +It sounds idiotic to describe it, but the important part is that the individual applications mean nothing to the other tablet makers. They provided good software to make them, and a super functional and easily accessible distribution platform. But for console makers, every game is prize. That mentallity gives better games, and could give much better apps. diff --git a/drafts/The Friction Dictionary of Tim Rogers.md b/drafts/The Friction Dictionary of Tim Rogers.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b4e457d --- /dev/null +++ b/drafts/The Friction Dictionary of Tim Rogers.md @@ -0,0 +1,82 @@ +


+ + +I came across this article, [In Praise of Sticky Friction](https://kotaku.com/in-praise-of-sticky-friction-5558166) by [Tim Rogers](http://largeprimenumbers.com/), about his concept of friction in game design. I appreciate his writing and games (well game, I've only tried _Videoball_) a lot, so I thought it could be a helpful tool to create an easy-to-refer-to version of his friction dictionary. I am already applying the concepts to [_The Girl Who Kicked a Rabbit_](https://takunomi.space/the_girl_who_kicked_a_rabbit/). + +**Crunchy Friction** + +> [...] is when things collide, hold there for an instant, and then, in that instant of holding, a "winner" is determined, and it is that winner who proceeds beyond the loser. The best instance of crunch I can think of would be — well, real-life American football [...] + +**Swishy Friction** + +> Good swishing is [...] scoring a headshot with a pistol in _Gears of War_. It's mainly because you can see the bullet traveling through the air. People love being able to see the bullet. You shoot at an enemy as he's starting to reload, and before he can duck behind cover to finish his reload, the bullet collides with his head. + +> [...] is when you press a button and something enormous and possibly impressive happens what feels, momentarily, beyond your cotrol. [...] Some games [...] expect you to be the kind of person to want to see something fantastic every time you press a button. + +**Soupy Friction** + +> [...] So you get games like _Dynasty Warriors_, where you press the square button and your guy twirls around like a ballerina, swinging and swishing his spear through the air, knocking over and killing a dozen dudes at a time. [...] Bad swishing is what we call Soupy friction. [...] they should be Chunky. [...] + +**Chunky Friction** + +> [...] _Sonic Rush_ [...] That's a game with no chunk. You can just hold right on the D-pad and your guy just goes forever. Chunky games are games where you have to fight for your right to keep moving to the right. [...] Look at _Dracula X: Rondo of Blood_ [...] and you'll see some terrifying, epic chunk. Every minor enemy you encounter requires a level of emotional investment that you just don't get from most modern action games. In _Rondo of Blood_, you find yourself against an axe knight early in the game. Your hero, Richter Belmont, is equipped with a whip and the abilities to whip high, whip low, walk forward, walk backward, jump, or crouch. That's all you get. [...] + +> Other games with high chunk levels include [...] _Gears of War_, and hey, even _Halo_ — any game where you have to fight hard to gain ground to move forward. _Ninja Gaiden_ and _Devil May Cry_ are interesting in that they contain chunk within the context of single contests. You can feel the chunk as the character merely turns around, away from one stunned enemy, to risk the chance of stunning another, to save himself a nick of damage in the long run. [...] + +**Sticky Friction** + +> [...] The point of sticky friction is that it lets the player savor the maybe-massive weight of what he just did. In the upper difficulties of a game like _God of War_, where the enemies can be some seriously tough mofos, any hit scored is a trophy-worthy achievement. You need to let the player feel it — then you need to let him do it again, and again, and again. + +> Here's a game I hate to give credit, because the game is actually pretty terrible: _Star Fox Adventures_. [...] Well, the brilliant friction in _Star Fox Adventures_ sure as shit doesn't save it, though I am a generous, kind type of person, so I can't forget it. It's probably the single best standard-attack-based sticky friction I've ever seen in an action game. [...] the timing of the screen freezes was impeccable. [...] Depending on the location of the hit, sometimes the pause is shorter than it'll be with a stronger hit, and sometimes you score four or five hits all in a row. It's pretty marvelous. It's a shame that the game didn't, you know, do anything with its sublime frictions. [...] + +**Velcro Friction** + +> is a specific type of sticky friction. [...] Maybe the best example of Velcro friction is when you chainsaw a guy in _Gears of War_. You come up behind him, clearly catching him with his pants (figuratively) down. You get him with the chainsaw, and everything freezes. [...] It's all about letting the player savor his big victory. [...] regular sticky friction is a chance to let the player enjoy still snippets of his awesomeness. Velcro friction is a way to awaken in the player the realization that his playing of the game is the story, that the on-screen action is a movie scene. + +**Juicy (also known as "jiggly" or "wiggly") Friction** + +> [...] It's when stuff moves a lot. [...] _Ratchet and Clank_ is probably the best example of a not-really-offensive juicy game. Juice is mostly for flash purposes. When Ratchet jumps up into the air, his hands flail in literally about 81 different directions before he lands. [...] + +**Greasy Friction** + +> is evil juice. It's a kind of bad swoosh. _Kingdom Hearts_ is the best example of this. [...] You press a button and your character twirls all the hell of the way around with his key-sword-thing corkscrewing all over; ultimately, he's only going to lunge it directly forward. [...] + +**Snappy Friction** + +> is when you press a button and something Just Fucking Happens, and you go "That. Just. Happened!" [...] A premier example of Electric Snappy Friction is in _God Hand_, when you do the stock mule-kick attack: it takes maybe two whole breathless seconds to charge up, though once you let it go, it collides with the enemy and immediately sends him flying. + +> Chunk and snap go well together. You will be chunking forward in _Rondo of Blood_, for example, and dancing with a dry (not juicy) tango when, suddenly, the opportunity to attack presents itself, and you are perfectly in range. You press the button and BAM — "That! Just! Happened!" Compare this to the swishy friction of _Space Invaders_, where you press the button and wait. With snap, you press the button and you feel. [...] + +**Meaty Friction** + +> [...] Meat manifests itself in sudden, jerky flinches. Boot up _Street Fighter II_ and then watch Ryu block a low roundhouse from Zangief. [...] + +**Crispy Friction** + +> [...] refers to anything that you don't really have to do in a game, though you definitely would rather keep doing it than stop doing it. [...] _Katamari Damacy_ has that new snow feeling every time you roll your expanding ball of garbage over a pile of objects, hear that little sucking sound, and feel that tennis-racket-like vibration of the controller. [...] + +**Electric Friction** + +> is the Friction of building something up and then letting it go. This is one of my personal favorite frictions, as used famously in the Mega Buster, introduced in _Mega Man 4_. You hold down the button, and then you let go. The longer you hold the button, the bigger the shot. The bigger the shot, the more the damage. [...] + +**Grippy Friction** + +> is a cousin of sticky friction, where the world continues to move while your player freezes in time. This is a peculiar friction. Probably the best example of it is the wall-climb in _Megaman X_: you jump at a wall, and Megaman grabs it with one hand, his back turned and feet pressed against it. He grinds down the wall with a pleasant enough (mid-rangey) sound. [...] It's the downward grind. It's so minutely tuned that its execution manages to walk into the brain and pull up a chair for years. [...] + +**Jerky Friction** + +> [...] Perhaps the most famous jerky friction is the Alpha Friction, that of _Super Mario Bros_. The Alpha Friction is the friction that occurs when Mario is running one direction, and you attempt to quickly change directions. He doesn't do it right away. You can feel him still pulling in the direction he was going, before he stops, sticks, and then begins walking, then running, in the other direction. [...] + +> Then we had _OutRun_, a game about drifting — about steering and countersteering. [...] + +**Clicky Friction** + +> is when you grab a game controller with the console turned off and just jag on it for a bit because — let's face it — game controllers are sometimes designed well enough for you to not really care if you're not playing a game. [...] just repeatedly inserting and removing a DS cartridge into and out of the slot. It makes such a delicious little click! + +**Spurty Friction** + +> doesn't actually exist too much in games. Are there any games that maximize the videogame potential of firehoses? [...] + +**Whooshy Friction** + +> is a type of friction like, when you use a magic ability to push something through the air so it flies into something else. In most games, these days, it's used as a cheap go-to solution for puzzles. "That door's locked, so i guess I have to pick up a piece of debris with my telekinesis". This is a friction with much potential, though it's really just crunching and snapping and swishing and sticking kind of shoehorned together. I reckon someone will get around to doing something with it. diff --git a/drafts/The Girl Who Kicked a Rabbit.md b/drafts/The Girl Who Kicked a Rabbit.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..07df4b9 --- /dev/null +++ b/drafts/The Girl Who Kicked a Rabbit.md @@ -0,0 +1,64 @@ + + +
+
+ +

"The Girl Who Kicked a Rabbit" is an ethereal, pulp spraying...

+ + +
+
+ +

...contemplative stroll from one end of a city to the other.

+ + +
+
+ +

As the little combat wizard Lys, you'll use the "Arcana" to fight a geyser of cute, and clever spirit bunnies.

+ + +
+


+

"Lys dabbles in the mystical arts: The knowledge of Arcana."

+ +

"Like so many others, she patrols the city at night, fighting the ghostly rabbit monsters."

+ +

"Although this night... there sure are a LOT of rabbits."

+ + +
+


+

Combat in "The Girl Who Kicked a Rabbit" is designed as an easy-going experience, with a whole basket of meticulously crafted mechanics to fiddle around with.

+ +

Every element of the game is engineered to react in the fastest, most responsive way.

+ + +
+


+

Selecting one of your astral weapons and obliterating a long-eared bugger, is an interface delight. The bunnies will hold "Catalysts", that you'll need in order to win.

+ +

Understanding which of these otherworldly baubles you need, and actually getting them before they disappear, will be half the battle.

+ + +
+


+

No reason to get all tricked out before the next hand-to-hand: Every battle gives you a different collection of mystical "Arcana" to wield. Some of them are good to go, and others you have to unlock on the job.

+ +

Good thing every critter killed is a piñata of goo-covered treasure.

+ + +
+


+

Murdering doe-eyed bunny beasts isn't enough to win! Somehow, you'll need to get enough "God's Wine" to close the flaming portals that keep sending out more opponents.

+ +

Sometimes the rabbits will drop this celestial nectar, and sometimes a more economic approach is required.

+ +

If you've got a little chemist inside you somewhere, perhaps you'd prefer making your own divine kombucha.

+ +
+

It runs on Windows, MacOS, and Debian. Write me if you wanna try it (Like seriously, playtesters are the best).

+ +
+I maintain a sporadic development log on TIGSource ([here](https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=71999.0)) + diff --git a/drafts/Towards a Void (Final Fantasy XVI).md b/drafts/Towards a Void (Final Fantasy XVI).md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..19b4fb4 --- /dev/null +++ b/drafts/Towards a Void (Final Fantasy XVI).md @@ -0,0 +1,37 @@ + + +"Oh finally. Anime nonsense. You know this whole 'kid's first gritty fantasy'-shtick was getting rather-" you exclaim twelve hours into Final Fantasy XVI. + +I offer the information I'd retrieved through online means: + +"No no no, 'akashic' is a real thing." + +"Get out of town," you jest. + +"I most certainly will not," I merrily play along. + +Yes indeed the idea of an amalgamation of all that is intangible seems to be important to some people a hundred years ago and thus the word sneaks into the lore of this game. I know, I know, questioning how some words with a very specific history in our own world exist in a fantasy setting, is a quick and rather dishonest path towards critique. It's just that this word is so unique that I bet more than 99 % of players had never heard of it before the game. It's a little like if our dear protagonist, Clive Rosfield, had accused someone of being a Zionist. Sure, in the world of Valisthea, it _could_ mean an organisation of historically persecuted people that established a land of their own, but are now entrenched in an old conflict where they are both occasionally the victims of horrific terrorism, and sometimes the oppressors of other people. That's not what we would think though, if Clive was to call someone a Zionist. We would think "why is Clive calling that guy a Jew?" + +It goes a little deeper, because the only reason to describe someone as Akashic, is if being Akashic is related to the concept from our world. And knowing the meaning of that word, the speaker would be aware of the relationship to the deeper lore of the Valisthea world, which, as the game also establishes, is basically unknown to everyone. + +So instead, what they _should_ be saying is: "look, that guy is turning blue and going crazy!" + +That aside, the story of Final Fantasy XVI is pretty cool. + +Okay enough of that. If you love shonen anime, but wish there was also one with simultaneously obtuse and remarkably childish mechanics, not unlike the most blood pumping version of Cookie Clicker... I might just have a game to prostitute out to you! That's mean. Some people absolutely love all of 16. This text might sound like a long painful screech from a jilted player of games, but I recognise what Final Fantasy XVI does differently: It caters to other people. + +There's a whole candy shop of modifiers in XVI to make it easier. Or rather, from the marketing, pre-release information, and enthusiast media, I understood Final Fantasy XVI as being a kind of game where I control a single character in battles against either swarms of chum, or in teeth-grinding one versus one encounters. Yet the modifiers tell a different story. At first, with the understanding I had gained from my previous mass-media indoctrination, I thought of the countless modifiers to say "don't worry about it. Dying happens to guys all the time. It's totally normal. Here, try this amulet of auto-winning," and naturally I scoffed so hard I got a migraine. The game wasn't even talking to me. I didn't know who it was talking to, cause the only battle I lost was my first encounter with the game's meanest, most optional challenge. I did not put on that sissy amulet. I put on my big boy pants. + +Yet as I lumbered through the very Xbox 360-esque, sludge-coloured latter half of the game, the absolute monotony of the gameplay finally broke me. Sort of. I did complete every side quest, and every hunt, and of course finished the main story. Oddly, I didn't bother with the challenge-rocks. Finished one, had a good time. It was just at that point in the game that I thought what most people playing that far probably thought: "Fuck. This game is kinda boring." And it's an odd kind of boring, cause I've finished a lot of Japanese Role-Playing Games. Final Fantasy XVI is a shallow game. It's got a lot of good, pleasant combat basics, and a slowly expanding inventory of spells you can mix and match across categories, as long as you earn the currency to entail you to this privilege. Unfortunately for a red-blooded enthusiast for the far eastern notion of role-playing games, such as yours truly, this isn't enough. There aren't enemies requiring ingenious spell combinations, or clever setups for Cross-magic-school spell combinations that reward experimentation. Just a seemingly endless supply of men and beasts to obliterate in comically flashy battles, in the same way over and over again. + +Genuine Likers of Final Fantasy XVI seem to value the narrative, characters, and lore. You know, those aspects I was busy telling myself were less important than the gameplay. Gameplay? You know, the gameplay the planners were kind enough to put up virtual, metaphorical billboards about. Billboards in the form of many, many modifiers that told me the game could actually be even easier, wink wink, nudge, nudge. Billboards like the same de-RPG-ification as God of War '18 did, where you're inexplicably asked to replace Sword 1 with Sword 2, and purchase and sell new spells that feel remarkably similar. Apparently I'm a bit thick, because to get their message though, the same group of developers would have had to create an entire, 10-year running MMORPG with the exact same goals of flashy, extremely shallow gameplay, tearfully boring side quests (with the occasional wildly impressive one), and a decent story stretched across far too many hours. Really, being disappointed reveals that I was naïve because Final Fantasy XVI is simply Creative Business Unit III's spiritual sequel to their long-running fantasy chatroom, an absolutely unremarkable and stunningly overvalued rollercoaster ride. The gameplay of the sixteenth entry in this storied series is exactly what the fans of the fourteenth entry love. That is... If they liked Final Fantasy XIV for its gameplay. I doubt that. + +It's tempting to skulk off and say "this series isn't for me anymore", but we all know the core of Final Fantasy has always been to change, and to become more accessible, while retaining a thrilling anime story. Final Fantasy XVI is definitely anime. The fact that I understand, but don't appreciate this attempt to make a game for everyone, doesn't mean the next one will go even further down this path. First of all I expect it to be a new MMO, but whatever comes afterwards could be an FPS. I like the trajectory of the 7 remakes, and I can get my pre-FF12 old school combat elsewhere. Now that I think about it, a de-RPG-ified FPS with a huge story and few Japanese gameplay mechanics actually sounds thrilling. + +Perhaps I'm a little bitter. I was excited for this game. And look, I know, I'm not entitled to the game I was hoping for. I just wish they would have kept a giant wall between their MMOs and their terminally offline games. + +This entire rant could be used as subtitles for one of those Der Untergang videos. + +Using RPG or JRPG as a short-hand for "I want some complicated systems to understand and utilise" does a disservice to what Final Fantasy XVI does though. There is something impressive about creating such a massive narrative, and then having the gameplay tied to it so overly simplistic and monotonous. There I go again. It's impossible for me to write that without sounding snarky, but I acknowledge that some people just wanna click cookies until they die. This game is more complicated than that, yet there is a familiarity. Most encounters can be handled by just turning off your brain, and that is definitely relaxing in its own right. The main characters might resist the notion of letting go of the self and joining the mindless whole, but the gameplay asks you to embrace it. In some sense I thought we had arrived at this most-accessible, entirely mindless gameplay with Final Fantasy XII. After all, accusing it of "playing itself" was the go-to criticism at the time of its release. I knew better of course. It let me build a complicated battle plan and asked me to understand status effects, turn orders, meta-progression, and occasionally to jump in and micro-manage, whenever my plan was failing. Clearly we weren't there yet, on the journey towards truly making a Final Fantasy for everyone. In Final Fantasy XVI you dodge and you kill. Describing the barebones metasystem in further detail is giving it too much credit. I don't want to say "and that's a good thing", but for some it probably is. + +Writing this has brought me closer to an understanding of Final Fantasy XVI. A chance to _respect_ something that I both loved and hated, but could never really comprehend. Still, if I could get to create a director's cut, I would cut the fluff and just have 10 consecutive levels of just the good stuff, selectable through a single menu as intense as the character-around-swirling inventory-map-skill tree menu right now. Essentially the stage replay mode plus cutscenes. What a breezy, high intensity 14 hours that would be. diff --git a/drafts/puzzle games.md b/drafts/puzzle games.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a2a747e --- /dev/null +++ b/drafts/puzzle games.md @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +Want to talk about Capybara games and game Clash of Heroes and Grindstone. + +So the process of _Tetris_ and _Street Fighter 2_ merging into _Puyo Puyo 2_, and how casual games develop from Tetris, and eventually _Bejeweled_ and _Candy Crush Saga_ and the likes appear. + +RPG spins appear like _Puzzle Quest_ and Square-Enix's _Gyromancer_ (Nov. 2009), but it is Capybara's _Clash of Heroes_ (_CoH_) that continues to blow my mind. A project they worked on for multiple years as _Little Big Battle_, while they were doing licensed projects for pre-smartphone games. Eventually the most creative company in the universe, Ubisoft, made a deal with Capy to use the _Might and Magic_ license and setting for their puzzle game, and the game was released as _Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes_ (Dec. 2009). + +Some ten years ago, Capy seemed to be a very vocal company. Their producer Nathan Vella, and often-director/designer Kris Piotrowsky would appear many places for talks and interviews. These last years though, Capy has disappeared more and more from the spotlight. They worked on _Below_ for a good many years, while the game industry changed. Smartphones aka _Stupid Devil Slates_ and their games, came to rule the public's attention (despite normal gaming not actually shrinking in user-bases). + +In 2018, _Legends of Solgard_ was released. I played this quite intensely in the winter of 2019/2020. As has come to be expected from mobile developers in these days, it's a shameless clone of _CoH_ with a more more insidious loop to make people return and eventually throw money at the game. _LoS_ does away with the decent story and thoughtful balancing of _CoH_ and instead attempts to just create a far more accessible and digestible experience. It of course fails spectacularly because of the nerdy setting in nordic mythos. There's a reason why Farmville appeals to a hundred billion players. Normies just want farms and plants. Not faeries and weapons. + +We all know how iPhone games went from being 5 bucks, to 1, to free, and becoming impressively dumber along the way. In 2019, Apple madea an attempt to remedy this situation by making a subscription service for quality. As usual, not actually because anyone that matters at Apple actually cares about video games, but whatever, a whole bunch of cool games suddenly appeared without any warning. + +Among those, was a game from Capy, the recently oddly quiet game company. Supposedly the idea came about in the days of _CoH_, but much had changed since then, so instead of a surprisingly good storyline and a world to explore, _Grindstone_ took the effective parts of modern mobile games, and simply had a vertical map of a trash-ton of levels in succession. + +There is something interesting seeing Capy create such a wonderful game as _CoH_, then ten years later it is bastardized, while Capy comes back with a thoughtful attempt at seeing if the progression that mobile game has done, could possibly be used for good, with _Grindstone_. + +The irony is that I've had to abandon both _LoS_ and _Grindstone_. _LoS_ was just a stupid game, that emanated a disgust for me as human. _Grindstone_ on the hand, is such an elegant game that.... well it just goes on forever. It never asks me to pay money to unlock gems to buy upgrades, or expects me to return everyday to keep me locked in to the experience. It (unfortunately) just goes on forever. diff --git a/images/2024-01-06/a.png b/images/2024-01-06/a.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6c591e7 Binary files /dev/null and b/images/2024-01-06/a.png differ diff --git a/images/2024-01-06/b.png b/images/2024-01-06/b.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6d4af92 Binary files /dev/null and b/images/2024-01-06/b.png differ diff --git a/posts/Interview: Oscar Rodriguez (7th Dragon III Code: VFD).html b/posts/Interview: Oscar Rodriguez (7th Dragon III Code: VFD).html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4acb3f6 --- /dev/null +++ b/posts/Interview: Oscar Rodriguez (7th Dragon III Code: VFD).html @@ -0,0 +1,120 @@ +


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Over the years, my fond memories of playing 7th Dragon III Code: VFD (7D3) haven't faded one bit. It's a classic Japanese Role-Playing Game that makes the turn-based format so free of waiting times, that the combat almost feels real-time. I dare say it didn't receieve a lot of attention at the time of release. This release is an odd story. All you have to do is look at the title. Why only release the fourth game in the series (There were two PSP titles, respectively 7th Dragon 2020 and 7th Dragon 2020-II (7D2, 7D2II))? How come the original games were made by Imageepoch, while 7D3 was made by Sega?

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Fortunately Twitter exists for a little while longer and so I asked Oscar Rodriguez a series of questions. I've taken the time to rephrase the message exchange as an actual interview, both so that it's easier to read, and so that it isn't lost in the swirling void of social media.

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Oscar Rodrigues is a Japanese engineer that has worked at Sega, Google, and currently AMD. On 7D3 he worked as a graphics programmer. He was kind enough to answer all of my questions, and in a rather detailed sense.

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As he himself notes, he was not a designer on the game, nor is he affiliated with Sega anymore, so take these answers as representing his personal views, and enjoy.

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SKETCHWHALE (S)

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Can I ask a you a few 7D3 questions? Maybe you can't answer these questions, but since it was a smaller team, maybe you have an idea.

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OSCAR RODRIGUEZ (O)

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Hi, and sorry for the delayed response. New year vacation and everything.

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I'll try to answer your questions, but please understand that I was on the programming team, so I had little visibility over these issues.

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S

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Was it a Sega game, or was it started by Imageepoch and then finished by Sega?

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OR

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When I received the source code, there had been a non trivial amount of work already done, about 20%~30%. We were tasked with finishing the game. I don't know who made the original initial work, but they weren't involved in finishing it. For some of the game building tools, we didn't even get the source code, so I assume that the break with the previous development company wasn't really clean for whatever reason. Unfortunately I don't know much more than this, and this is merely my hypothesis.

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S

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It's really interesting to get this perspective about the work that had been done before your team started working. The structure of corporate Japanese game development is a bit of a mystery to me, and it becomes no less puzzling when comparing the names of who worked on 7D1, 7D2, and 7D2II compared to 7D3. Of what I've played from 7D2, they look a lot like 7D3, but with a little more super diminutive art style. Was part of the development also in porting PSP-targeted code to the 3DS?

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OR

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No. I only worked on VFD. I first played the PSP games because of the Hatsune Miku collabs, and I quite enjoyed the series. I was certainly thrilled when I learned I could work on VFD.

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[NOTE: Hatsune Miku appears as a guest character in the two PSP titles]

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S

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    +
  1. How did the design change when becoming a Sega game?
    2. +
+ +

OR

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I wasn't involved in the game design, so I don't know much about this. However, all four 7th Dragon games were directed by the late Rieko Kodama, and as far as I know she was quite hands on with the game design, so I reckon not much might have changed with the devteam change.

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S

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I wasn't aware that Rieko Kodama worked on the previous titles as well. I'd only noticed her name in association with 7D3. I must admit it saddens me a little that 7D3 didn't get more attention, considering the love that Skies of Arcadia still receives. I'm getting the impression that the game's development was split between a design team, that remained the same, and a programming team, that was switched. How does that description sound?

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[NOTE: Rieko Kodama (1963-2022) was a Japanese game developer. Over her long career she famously worked as a producer on Skies of Arcadia, and as a director on Phantasy Star IV amongst many other games.]

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OR

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To be completely honest, I'm not even completely sure if she was involved with the older games. She was quite knowledgeable about the game world, and VFD felt like it was "her game", so I assumed she came up with the whole series, but it's possible that she didn't... Not sure... As for how games are made, it depends on many factors, but usually you have the "developer", who makes the game, and the "publisher" who funds it and sells it.

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Sometimes the developer and publisher are the same company, but for most games this is not the case. Publishers like Sega have many more games that they want to make than games that they can make internally, so for most games they hire an external company to make it for them.

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When doing so, Sega often puts a producer and a director to make sure the game turns out how they want. I reckon that for VFD, Kodama-san and maybe Watari-san were involved with the first company, and for some reason they stopped working with that company and brought the game source code and everything else that they had so we could then finish making the game internally. But once again, these are all my educated guesses. I was not involved in these decisions, so I can't say for sure.

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S

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Which games continue what made 7D3 special? Like, the super responsive combat or the interesting character type mechanics.

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OR

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"Special" is subjective.

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I enjoyed working on this game because we had a small team, freedom to do things the way we wanted, and we worked very closely with the other teams. This is a dream case scenario in game development. One thing I can say is that, being the graphics programmer, I worked very closely with the art director and the art team, all of which were very talented, and we did some really cool things graphically that we had originally thought the 3DS wasn't able to do. The team itself, at least on the programming side, was built ad-hoc. Some of us had worked on other projects together, but it's not like it was an existing team that made lots of games. This is also the case for basically every game I worked on at Sega.

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S

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"Cool things [...] originally thought the 3DS wasn't able to do." You've GOTTA elaborate on that.

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OR

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Showing all 9 characters on the screen at the same time was something that we initially thought wasn't possible with the 3DS hardware. When I first got the code, at most we could show 4. I'm glad we were eventually able to get all 9 at 30fps. Also, what we were able to do with the hair dynamics was pretty cool for the 3DS. You have to look very closely to notice it though, but that was also a cool addition. Also, the full screen effects were far from trivial. These can really kill performance, but we found ways to do all the effects that the art team wanted to make and still hit 30fps.

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I particularly liked the color aberration effect. That required some cool tricks on the 3DS hardware.

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S

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I'd describe 7D3 as a fast-paced JRPG. I get the impression that I'M hitting the enemies, and like the game never makes me wait for combat. Are you a fan of Japanese role-playing games yourself? Is there an older title that made you go "Yes! This is how it's done", and a newer title that makes you go "They've still got it!"?

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OR

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I enjoy the genre, and I think the 7D games came out pretty well. I've played a few others. I particularly enjoyed the Mother series and the Mario RPGs.

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I'm not really the best person to answer what makes a game good, since once again, I'm a programmer, not a game designer.

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S

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Attributing auteurship to games is a common practice that might not make sense. Who were the people that made this game special, and how can we follow that special sauce get made elsewhere?

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OR

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I think that games with small teams with lots of autonomy get made with love, and tend to earn the hearts of many players.

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That's why I like indie/doujin games and make my own.

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S

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7D3 really did seem to have a lot of autonomy. Something like the dating mechanic requires a lot of work to add, but gives the game a very personal aspect. It also impressed me that it wasn't removed in the western release. From social media it looks like you aren't working in games professionally anymore, but now that mention you make your own games, what are those? With your experience I imagine they are both very technically and design-wise competent. And made with a lot of love, hahah.

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OR

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Yes, I make my own games, and I have a few on Steam and PlayStation Store. I hope I will be able to make millions out of it in the future :)

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[NOTE: Oscar mentions that he likes to keep his professional and indie work separate, so I've omitted that part.]

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S

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Thank you for answering all my questions!

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[END NOTE: Oscar and I continued talking through private messages after this, and he told me more about how teams and game development was organized at Sega. As a software developer myself I found this immensely interesting, but it doesn't quite fit in the interview. It came from our talk about how Rieko Kodama actually was producer on all four 7th Dragon titles and I needed to understand more about what it means to be a producer in a Japanese game development context. Finally, he told me about his coolest experience at Sega: he had convinced the director (Kawabata-san (Kawabata-kantoku?)) to let Oscar sit in when the voice acting was done, and he got to hear Toyosaki Aki work. This was apparently an unforgettable experience, and I just thought it was a delightful little detail in this game's production. Toyosaki-san is a profilific voice actress, with roles too numerous to count. I know for her role as Hirasawa Yui in K-On! especially. In 7D3 she voiced the dangerously young Nagumo Mio, one of the main characters. Once again, thank you to Oscar Rodriguez for answering all my questions and my follow-up questions, and continuing to talk to me even afterwards. His professional online presence can be found at https://twitter.com/rapapaing in case you want to talk to him yourself, or perhaps ask him about his indie games. I think they're pretty cool, so let's hope he achieves success there as well.]