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Off the Cuff - Player Personalization

I've been quite busy the past few weeks, still writing essays but in general as well. I didn't like how little was going up so I wanted to put up something even if it isn't amazing. This is just an off the cuff sort of rambling... podcast? About 10 minutes long, I wanted to keep generally themed but around something I've had difficulty forming into an essay since my thoughts are so scattered. I hope this is at least mildly diverting.

The actual audio's contents are just about player cus...

The Strange Case of Mega Man and Boktai

Normally I try to bring a faux-expertise to what I write here. While I can at least meaningfully speculate on something that confuses me, I generally try to have as informed an outsider perspective as I can manage. This isn't the case here, but I wanted to talk a bit about the curious dynamic between the Mega Man Battle Network and Boktai series in the early ‘00s. This'll probably run short but I'll do a bit of history for interest.

For those unfamiliar or who have forgotten, Mega Man...

Silent Hill 4 - A Good Ghost Story

Silent Hill fandom in this day and age is known far and wide within gaming as being extremely angry, even by video game fandom standards. This is distinct from merely Silent Hill fans as individuals. As a community, the kind who would describe themselves as remaining torchbearers for this franchise, they are collectively just a bizarre tragic-if-it-weren't-so-toxic combination of furious at most of the franchise's entries and eternally certain that this is the year that it comes back—Kojima...

Subtitles In Games

Something I rarely think to mention are the things I'm glad have changed in games over the years. It's easy to identify cases where increasing size of the corporations creating them has led to worse monetary practices and broader abuses of the people making them. There's an infinite well of topics to draw on for things that aren't a case of "should improve" but "must improve or the entire enterprise simply isn't worth it." I do want to highlight something though that does make me happy. Over ...

After Decades, Mystical Ninja Goemon Zero

In almost every sense, essays here are just "for me" but there are always degrees. Sometimes I'm trying to bring across a point I care about, or to try to better understand historical context. This time this is just for me to sort out my feelings on something that has been in my head for the majority of my life at this stage. Mystical Ninja Goemon Zero as it's now known has been literally floating around in my brain as something I wanted to at least try since I first read about it nearly 21 y...

Oddities - Ape Escape 2001

There's something very presumptuous about putting a year at the end of your game's name. It is like a tacit promise to the consumer of two things. The product you are selling is going to be followed up consistently, if not yearly then close enough to it that it makes sense to designate by year. The second tacit implication is that these future products are produced with the intention of outmoding the prior product. Whether they actually do or not is debatable, but that's the signal to the con...

The PS2 Fossil Record - Rumble Racing

Arcade racing games used to be a pretty big business. Sega built a name for itself off games like Hang-on and Outrun. Namco's Ridge Racer was a bright burning flame during the PS1's reign as the dominant console. Even now Mario Kart is consistently one of the highest selling games of any given generation. Unfortunately, Mario Kart is kind of it for arcade racing games now. The sea change to the racing genre with the rise of Gran Turismo is hard to undersell. Over the decades since, we've seen...

Intuitiveness is Easy to Conflate with Prior Knowledge

There's not really a snappy way to say what I'm getting at with this post, but there is something that permeates video game discourse and especially becomes a problem as a game gets analyzed and overanalyzed. The more you examine a game's construction and the more you replay it, the harder it is to understand the new player experience and what knowledge you're taking for granted. The experienced player will expect new players to intuit information that's only obvious in hindsight. That itself...

The PS2 Fossil Record - Fantavision

The early rush to get out software used to produce a lot of strange objects. The fundamental hardware design of a new system was almost totally incompatible with how a previous piece of hardware worked. That's not even mentioning that the leap between generations meant that a hastily converted game from a prior console was going to look antiquated no matter what anyway. This meant that a lot of ideas that would probably be considered too thin of an idea to build a game off of managed to sneak...

Dark Cloud and Communicating a Gameplay Loop

There's a somewhat famous quote from Jaime Griesemer, a designer on Halo, talking about game design and construction. In it he describes a game like Halo as "30 seconds of fun" repeated in different scenarios, different configurations for variety/to keep it interesting. It's about as succinct an illustration as you can have of a gameplay loop. Just about every major game works on these loops, these peaks and troughs of action and inaction. Some are more obvious about it, and some have larger ...

The PS2 Fossil Record - Orphen Scion of Sorcery

Often at console launch you'll get one or two licensed games—if you know anything about either launch games or licensed games you know full well that this is a terrifying crunch to put literally any human being through. I wish I could tell you that Orphen beats the odds, or even that it feels like it could have beaten the odds, but it feels so half-constructed I can't even tell if the ideas in it were decent. The game is overall made in such a fashion that I feel certain it was built essent...

Star Ocean the Second Story - Joyous Experimental Ambition

This is an essay I was basically destined to write the second I chose to actually do any sort of project like this, but the announcement of Star Ocean: The Divine Force and some gentle prodding from a friend has pushed it to the front of my priorities list. Star Ocean: The Second Story is one of my favorite games ever, a complete car crash of strange subsystems by a development team with utterly unbridled ambition. It represents the PlayStation era of JRPGs at their absolute best. Experimenta...

Oddities - Ore no Ryouri

It used to be that the weirdest games came from Japan, and the even weirdester games never left the country. We've largely moved past that period, both because the weirdest moderate budget excesses of the PS1 and PS2 eras are long in the rear view and because the market for localizations of niche games has kinda been able to saturate the number of available weird games to import. Still, some of these oddities had unexpected legacies due to the ways they acquired Western acknowledgment. One ta...

Dark Souls Terrible Marketing Masterstroke

I didn't want to write this follow-up. If you haven't read it, this will be me expanding on "Machismo and the Marketing Masculinizing of the Video Game Hobby" which may be found here (https://www.patreon.com/posts/machismo-and-of-56440167). I didn't want to write this follow-up because I barely felt qualified to write the first essay. I'm the target audience for this kind of marketing. I have no b...

The Quintet Sextet - Soul Blazer

Quintet's a developer with a lot of clout for a very specific crowd. It’s a company that burned exceptionally brightly on the Super Nintendo, carving a legacy that sparks reverence from fans of the console to this day. The only game of theirs that's still actually officially playable at this point is ActRaiser, and it probably has the most lasting cultural memory, but the trilogy which started with Soul Blazer is still revered. These games had been on my to-play list for well over a decade ...

The PS2 Fossil Record - Ephemeral Fantasia

The choices for RPGs on the PS2 in the first year were pretty slim. This was especially the case if you wanted traditional turn-based RPGs. While From Software and Level-5 would produce a number of action RPGs in that first year, there really just wasn't much in the way of vanilla JRPGs on the system. Honestly, it's a bit odd considering the genre was at the height of its powers at the time. I almost feel like it was a genre that was well understood and developers wanted to give the new hardw...

Minor changes and clerical notes

Just want to mention that there will be some experimentation with making the audio versions of posts the top of future posts to see if I like that a bit better presentationally. The full text of any given post will still be underneath it, it'll just have the audio at the top in a player rather than as an attachment at the bottom of posts.

I also want to put a special thank you out to a friend who has generously been giving these essays a better editing hand than I could manage on my own...

The PS2 Fossil Record

I talk about the PS2 a lot here, it's probably where the broadest spectrum of my knowledge comes from. It's the system I tracked as many games for as I could, subscribed to multiple magazines, read websites. When I had trouble at home, I immersed myself in caring about video games to not think about what else about my life was going wrong. It is the peak of my often unhealthy obsession and hopefully will remain that way as I try to be an at least slightly more rounded person. I kind of want t...

The Creative and Corporate Duality of Video Games

The games as art debate is stale and pointless. The question of whether a medium can produce good art is stale and pointless, hashed out eternally over the 00s and 10s. I'd much rather declare victory and discuss the fallout. Games can be art, games can be good art, but their need to serve multiple masters as a corporate product and a collaborative artistic work means that they run into a number of problems.

The obvious one is of course, corporate desire to maximize profits. AAA Games c...

The Early 00s and the Age of the GTA Knockoff

Hey let's shoot for some synergy, the PS2 Grand Theft Auto games are being remastered/have recently been remastered as of when this goes up. It's hard to describe how singular these games were in defining the way that the PS2 and by extension the entire industry would be going forward. Open world as a design paradigm was popularized almost singlehandedly by Grand Theft Auto 3. That said it'd be silly to just talk about those games, plenty of people have talked about them, people with more nua...

The Fighting Game Sequel Problem

Fighting games are easier (though still extremely hard) to update than do sequels to. When you're making Street Fighter II: Champion Edition your roadmap for what needs fixing is tons of open player reaction to what's wrong with Street Fighter II: The World Warrior. When you're making Street Fighter III you have to impress everyone who has spent years getting used to the general flow of how Street Fighter II works. I want to look at the things that contribute to these reactions, what can miti...

An Unsung Innovator - The Matrix: Path of Neo

As everything on this patreon is probably already making clear, I love throwing on games from 10, 20, 30 years ago and just observing them for a couple of hours. To take dim memories and cast them into the light or to experience something I remembered reading about and never playing and just seeing how I feel about it with no prep. I have a strong love of older games both as games for their own sakes and as historical artifacts of how design has evolved over the years. Licensed games are part...

Oddities - Blood Will Tell

Sega of the mid 00s was a tragic company to watch, desperately latching on to whatever new identity it could in the wake of its utter destruction as a hardware company, but still retaining a glut of talented developers capable of producing unexpected gems. I want to highlight a weird little game they made, a licensed game even, from this period. Released in the west as Blood Will Tell it's only when you see the title screen you realize what a pedigree it has as its true English title is "Bloo...

Design Lineage - Yakuza - It's (not) Shenmue for 'normal people'

The creator of the Ryu Ga Gotoku (Yakuza) franchise, Toshihiro Nagoshi, has left Sega. It's the end of a long tenure at the company dating back thirty years and with dozens of classic games that he acted in some major position on. Nevertheless his lasting legacy will be gifting Sega one of the franchises that has kept it afloat in the lean years following their exit from the console market, the aforementioned Yakuza. Yakuza's place in the world is often a bit misunderstood though, as many see...

Oddities - Mizzurna Falls

I'm sick of all the complaining I do here so I want to talk about a game I threw in one night and  ended up adoring even though I think it is technically kind of a failure to be an approachable game. Dearly departed Human Entertainment's Mizzurna Falls. To be clear, I would consider this game to be honestly pretty good at what it's doing, but it's so ambitious, so technically undermined by what they were attempting to do on PlayStation hardware, and so utterly punishing based on aspects ...

Rest in Piss Koichi Sugiyama

By the time this likely goes up it'll have been a few weeks since Koichi Sugiyama passed. If that name's not familiar to you then... well mostly I'm sorry for the information this is going to transmit to you. Sugiyama was the composer of the Dragon Quest titles and, by the title of this you can probably tell that aside from being a very very gifted composer, he had very little to recommend about him as a human being.

Sugiyama was, to contextualize the kind of person he was, born in 1931...

A History and Defense of Tetsuya Nomura Part 1 Pre Kingdom Hearts

Let's talk about Tetsuya Nomura, a man with heavy involvement with many of Square's most mainstream games and ever a lightning rod for debate about his merits as an artist, game designer, director, fashion designer, etc. He's been in the industry for over 30 years, starting as a debugger on FFIV. He did some monster designs in FFV as well as much of the enemy spritework (this helps explain why the enemy sprites in FFV are so very different in style from the ones in IV). He designed some of th...

Not All Japanese Adventure Games are Visual Novels (Nor are All Dating Sims)

Let's talk about Adventure games. I love a good slow paced adventure when I'm in the right mood. The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles (buy it buy it buy it) was so good it got me to actually write again. The plot structure can have more build up, more set up, more dramatic rise and fall. The slower nature allows for the focusing in on more detailed areas with detailed art but plenty of time to drink them in. I have adored many structures and sub-genres that fit in the grand scheme of the very br...

Working Out My Distaste - Final Fantasy XVI Reveal Trailer

So I sometimes intend to use this for subjects I sort of hope age poorly. In this case it's the reaction that's been brewing in my mind for like a year now to the FFXVI reveal and why the game fundamentally does not excite me based on what they showed. The game had by all accounts been in dev for about 3.5 years by then so it feels reasonable to say that what was shown is representative. I want this game to be something I enjoy and I have little doubt it'll be "good" for whatever metric used ...

Godhand Totally Deserved That 3.0

Every so often I have to pursue a topic that is of consequence to no one but me basically. If every essay here was me doing sad prognostifications about the state of the industry this place would be miserable rather than merely tedious. So I'll pull up a common punching bag for people ragging on game reviews. In 2006 Capcom's departed Clover Studios released an oddball Beat-em-up called Godhand to extremely mixed reviews. The game's die hard fans have successfully memeified the low scores giv...