Detchibe
BACKER
1994
Speaking strictly on 'Around the World,' the game portion of 3D Atlas, this is horrifically weak. The information presented in its trivia questions can be gleaned from the main program's statistics and multimedia videos. For every vexillological vexation there comes a quandary about orchid imports for three periphery states. Be asked to identify a country from its capital, then identify another from a collage. It is altogether boring at best. Points are converted to miles, and every three questions you trade in your miles to select a destination in your quest to circumnavigate the globe. Efficient travel relies on deeper geographic knowledge, but outside multiplayer (which I didn't even know the 3DO supported) it hardly matters.
Where 3D Atlas shines is as an early multimedia font of encyclopedic knowledge. Physically manipulating the globe is not the topic of interest, but the supplementary videos, renders, and tools. Abound in 3D Atlas is Marshall McLuhan's notion of the global village, making the planet metaphorically smaller through easy access to international knowledge and peoples. Though this often presents itself here, as elsewhere, in the exacerbation of differences between the Western world and that of the Other, that global-mindedness was a reality throughout the 1990s. It is thereby unapologetic in its effective appropriation of signifiers of the Other, believing this uncritical presentation to be more egalitarian and human-focused. That is all to say, those depictions in 3D Atlas are, at best, anthropologically and ethnographically disingenuous, at worst, a reinforcement of prejudice. By way of example, Afghanistan's country profile speaks only of colonialism and the nation's global position as a centre of conflict. Panama's touches on Manuel Noriega, political turmoil, and the Panama Canal. Former Soviet states might have a sentence devoted to pre-modern histories, but would convince the unaware 'player' that Soviet history constitutes their totality. The image for each country is a postcard typically comprised of traditional garb, a natural feature, and a cultural construct.
Overhead city views demonstrate the novelty of satellite imagery at the tail end of the 20th century. That high resolution photography of major population centres had been taken by the USSR, now collapsed, is passed off as cute and interesting, as if the technology would not continue to be used for malicious purposes following the Cold War, as if Western nations were not documenting that and more. Prior to the explosion of Big Data, a couple cities from way up high was the most people might reasonably expect to see. In 2023, it is as droll as most consider Google Earth to be.
In keeping with the resurgence of environmentalism in the 1980s into the 1990s, the Reports section of 3D Atlas is devoted to the perhaps overly simplistic concerns of the era. Acid rain, nuclear energy, overpopulation, and ozone abut water usage, global warming, and oil pollution. The now known to be entirely too optimistic projections therein seem quaint today. Mention is repeatedly made of treaties and protocols aiming to reduce emissions and environmental harm that we know had no effect. Were that not heartbreaking enough on its own, timelapses are available to show the spread of oil from the Exxon Valdez spill (so minuscule next to Deepwater Horizon and Ixtoc 1). Antarctic and Arctic sea ice presentations suggest a static nature of their maximum and minimum extents for the decades preceding record lows. The hopeful messages underlying these reports inflicts tremendous hurt on me today.
3D Atlas is functionally useless for its intended use case nearly thirty years following its release. It is sluggish, limited in scope, dry, and outdated. As a snapshot of a particular worldview for a particular time, it is a relic, a single piece in a larger puzzle of multimedia scholastic utopianism that naively saw knowledge as positive power.
Where 3D Atlas shines is as an early multimedia font of encyclopedic knowledge. Physically manipulating the globe is not the topic of interest, but the supplementary videos, renders, and tools. Abound in 3D Atlas is Marshall McLuhan's notion of the global village, making the planet metaphorically smaller through easy access to international knowledge and peoples. Though this often presents itself here, as elsewhere, in the exacerbation of differences between the Western world and that of the Other, that global-mindedness was a reality throughout the 1990s. It is thereby unapologetic in its effective appropriation of signifiers of the Other, believing this uncritical presentation to be more egalitarian and human-focused. That is all to say, those depictions in 3D Atlas are, at best, anthropologically and ethnographically disingenuous, at worst, a reinforcement of prejudice. By way of example, Afghanistan's country profile speaks only of colonialism and the nation's global position as a centre of conflict. Panama's touches on Manuel Noriega, political turmoil, and the Panama Canal. Former Soviet states might have a sentence devoted to pre-modern histories, but would convince the unaware 'player' that Soviet history constitutes their totality. The image for each country is a postcard typically comprised of traditional garb, a natural feature, and a cultural construct.
Overhead city views demonstrate the novelty of satellite imagery at the tail end of the 20th century. That high resolution photography of major population centres had been taken by the USSR, now collapsed, is passed off as cute and interesting, as if the technology would not continue to be used for malicious purposes following the Cold War, as if Western nations were not documenting that and more. Prior to the explosion of Big Data, a couple cities from way up high was the most people might reasonably expect to see. In 2023, it is as droll as most consider Google Earth to be.
In keeping with the resurgence of environmentalism in the 1980s into the 1990s, the Reports section of 3D Atlas is devoted to the perhaps overly simplistic concerns of the era. Acid rain, nuclear energy, overpopulation, and ozone abut water usage, global warming, and oil pollution. The now known to be entirely too optimistic projections therein seem quaint today. Mention is repeatedly made of treaties and protocols aiming to reduce emissions and environmental harm that we know had no effect. Were that not heartbreaking enough on its own, timelapses are available to show the spread of oil from the Exxon Valdez spill (so minuscule next to Deepwater Horizon and Ixtoc 1). Antarctic and Arctic sea ice presentations suggest a static nature of their maximum and minimum extents for the decades preceding record lows. The hopeful messages underlying these reports inflicts tremendous hurt on me today.
3D Atlas is functionally useless for its intended use case nearly thirty years following its release. It is sluggish, limited in scope, dry, and outdated. As a snapshot of a particular worldview for a particular time, it is a relic, a single piece in a larger puzzle of multimedia scholastic utopianism that naively saw knowledge as positive power.
1998
One of the weirdest consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic has been a fundamental shift in how art can be and is consumed. The pre-vaccine pandemic prohibited the perusal of physical artworks since galleries are enclosed spaces which, at times, necessitate a close proximity with others outside of your cohort. With how stringent the atmospheric conditions are in most galleries, the idea of introducing additional moisture through people with COVID-induced sniffles was certainly a concern for many curators. With the rest of the world moving to primarily online modes of functioning, the realm of art followed suit with a greater focus on digitisation and accessibility. With a 77% drop in museum attendance in 2020, cultural spaces were afforded the rare opportunity to strip the walls of famous works so they could be catalogued more extensively, scanned in higher quality than ever before, and be presented globally over the internet.¹ As a part of Google's own AR initiatives, paintings and sculptures could be virtually projected into one's own home to impart a sense of scale, and to allow viewers to get incredibly close to the artwork.² These searchable catalogues and viewable works are great in theory, particularly from an accessibility standpoint, but the glut of artwork available means a lesser focus on the provenance of particular works and artists, and a consumption pattern akin to scrolling through an Instagram feed. One of the most important parts of the gallery experience, personally, is the contextualisation of more renowned works amongst similar pieces which are largely omitted from the cultural canon. Why should these specific works by Degas or Warhol or Vermeer be so celebrated, so singularly highlighted? This digitisation and the general accelerationism induced by COVID only exacerbates this problem. If I have access to all this art but no guidance, no structure to appreciating it, then I'm just going to look at the artists I'm aware of and look at their work, like those who enter the Louvre and beeline it to the Mona Lisa. In most cases these people don't care about the context of the work, just that they saw it. Perhaps this isn't intrinsically wrong, but it is certainly a vapid means of consumption, focusing on clout over appreciation.
When restrictions did ease up in the second-half of 2020, the spaces which were available for much of the world were more open environs where physical distancing was easy and air circulation was better. It was about this time that 'immersive exhibits' exploded in cities across North America and Europe. Largely hosted in industrial spaces, these shows permitted distancing through projections of works onto the walls of a space, creating an 'immersive experience' by having attendees be subsumed by an artwork or its constituent components. There's an argument to be made that 2020's Netflix series Emily in Paris aided the exponential growth of these shows as a consequence of the Netflix Effect, but even with this as a contributing factors, the omnipresence of these exhibits seems inexplicable.³ Nonetheless, the directors of these shows and artist foundations have claimed that this maximal approach to the works of Vincent van Gogh in particular assist in understanding the artist on a more personal level, as if viewers will see the world as the artist did, will understand the machinations of their mind prior to their death.⁴ Even ignoring the fact that this is an impossibility, to understand the lived experience of another, this perpetuates the masturbatory romanticisation of the tortured 'other,' without engaging with their purported experience in a critical manner. This ballooning of the work may induce a sense of being 'inside' the painting, but it also means turning the work of an artist known for their impasto and its consequent three-dimensionality into a flat image. Beyond this, the poor quality of a projected image in relation to a physical work means those brushstrokes won't even appear on the walls of a space, just as they won't on the screen of a phone.⁵ My problem with these exhibits is not with idea of simulacra of the works themselves, but with this glorified and yet dehumanised reproduction, claiming to be focused on the personal history of the work while losing the humanity and physical deliberation of the paintings' creation. The immersive experience has nothing to do with the works themselves, but with the idea of the work, allowing us to say we were there rather than we saw.⁶ And in the wake of the success and proliferation of these van Gogh shows, we are now inundated with these $50 multi-sensory experiences for Klimt, for Monet, for Chagall, for Picasso, for Tutankhamen, for Frida Kahlo (who I'm sure would have loved the commodification of her work for vapid consumption by white people). The presence of pre-recorded vague statements and the wafting stench of cypress brings as much to the experience of viewing these low quality images as South Park: The Fractured But Whole's promotion stunt the Nosulus Rift did by letting you smell farts. These shows claim to complement the physical gallery experience but they merely detract. What impetus is there to gaze upon a work in person when influencers claim this is superior to the rinky-dink painting, when one can state with the authentic belief that they have already seen it, when you can go do yoga in a painting!?⁷
With it made abundantly clear now how much I detest the idea of the immersive experience, it must come as surprising that I was rather taken by this low-tech educational multimedia game from 1998 of all things. If the immersive exhibit is something I consider almost infantilising, how could this fare better? What Mission Sunlight has going for it immediately is that it isn't trying to pass itself off as some truest means of taking in van Gogh's work. The intro cinematic makes it evident that this is not the world of van Gogh, but some dystopic strangereal where the sun has gone out, taking with it the colour of the artist's paintings.
Our first interaction is with an on-the-fritz robot who gives us a magical star and makes it abundantly clear that despite his algorithmic attempts at restoring the paintings, he crucially has never been able to see the paintings up close. When we inspect the sprite of Fourteen Sunflowers in a Vase, we are welcomed by a polygonal representation of the artist himself. Rather than be some depressed bastardisation of our posthumous reinterpretation of van Gogh, this avatar is almost chipper in his sun hat. He invites us to use the magnifying class button, and when we do we get an incredibly close-up look at the painting and the brushstrokes on the canvas. A 115MB title from two decades past renders this human aspect more concrete than the supposed technological marvels of our present day can. Furthermore, you can click another button to have van Gogh hold up the painting so you can understand its scale.
Walking through the exhibit space, not only are the walls a disgusting hue of dentist-office beige, but they are dirty and in disrepair. The paintings are grey-scale, and even the vases which should be abound with almond blossoms are little more than collections of gnarled branches. Clicking on these paintings transports the player 'into' them, and here they are shown in colour. The subject matter is therein rendered three-dimensional and the player can move their perspective to see beyond the confines of the painting. What is particularly endearing about this is how the dithered textures impart a quasi-Impressionist feel despite being a limitation of technology. Instead of hearing lilting violins, the soundscape is realistic. Roosters crow, the wind blows, leaves tumble to the ground. In each painting you need to find an object to restore the colour, and certain interactables help you proceed. For Cottage with Decrepit Barn and Stooping Woman, one can actually enter the slanted building only for the interior to be the selfsame from The Potato Eaters, with the table embodying Still Life with an Earthen Bowl with Potatoes. Obviously some liberties have been taken in order to create these more singular, cohesive spaces, but it helps to demonstrate that these paintings were not created in a vacuum, and in fact were inspired by similar, if not identical, settings. These early works are of the same earthen hues in game as they are in reality, contrasted against a gorgeous blue sky.
Finding a potato for Still Life with an Earthen Bowl with Potatoes bestows upon us an educational tidbit of context, that still life paintings are historically flowing with finest dining ware and ostentatious displays of food, representing wealth and bounty. We swirl around Jan Davidszoon de Heem's Still-Life with Fruit and Lobster before van Gogh tells us his desire to show the food of the poor and demonstrate this connection between dining ware from the earth, and tubers from the earth in a display of realist honesty. Restoring The Potato Eaters tells us that it is difficult to break with what you have been told to do. Though this is obviously in response to academic traditions as taught to classically trained artists at Paris' École des Beaux-Arts, it resonates with me because of those immersive experiences. In a sense, those exhibits have broken with the expected, but they have also perpetuated that consumptive mode which snaps a picture and moves on, akin to an Instagram trap. In Mission Sunlight, the tradition of the art gallery has been eschewed for a different maximal approach which at times demonstrates a falsehood about these works through the artistic liberties of an imagined 3D space, but by also teaching directly without shoving contexts onto a placard, a catalogue, or an art history education. Maybe this gamification of art is itself problematic too, but as an edutainment piece of software I am more forgiving.
When we venture into The Night Cafe, I am apprehensive because of my time with 2016's The Night Cafe: A VR Tribute to Van Gogh. That grotesquerie attempted to bring multiple works into one space in a manner I would consider a failure, those other works managing to detract from titular cafe. The scale of the people made it especially hard to immerse myself in, but thankfully Mission Sunlight opted to remove those figures entirely. The geometries here are simpler and more angular, but it weirdly works. Instead of the yellow smears of smooth brushwork in A VR Tribute coming off the lamps, Mission Sunlight's lamps take the actual brushwork of The Night Cafe and turn them into quasi-3D sprites, like a tree in Super Mario 64 to much greater effect. A VR Tribute is a strangely disconnected sensory experience. Mission Sunlight inundates the player with the din of cafe culture, clocks ticking away incessantly, indistinct conversation washing over us.
The later part of van Gogh's life is, understandably, much less depressing here than in reality. Stepping into the Hospital at Arles series, we can hear the anguished cries of the patients who are again not depicted, but the commentary avoids sounding downtrodden. Van Gogh himself speaks of the proliferation of Japanese art and Japonisme when we restore Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, rather than wallow in misery. Ward in the Hospital in Arles' commentary touches on the unappreciative response to his art, but again it isn't masturbatory, but informative. We see van Gogh not as a man defined by mental illness, but simply as a man who wished to paint. Though this is painting too simple of a portrait in many ways, it also helpfully avoids the pratfalls of the contemporary imagining of van Gogh.
Mission Sunlight warms the cockles of my heart in a way I didn't expect it to at all. It is simply a good piece of edutainment software which is informative in a way I wouldn't expect of a children's approach to art history. It is refreshing and truthfully immersive in rendering paintings as physical spaces, rather than as flat images on a wall. It evokes an honesty to the painted work that is astounding for 1998, and serves as a phenomenal alternative to AR experiences or digital catalogues. This is a work which expects willful engagement, and rewards it handsomely. I wholeheartedly recommend downloading a copy and running this in a VM if you have the slightest interest in art history.
1. Alexander Panetta, “A World of Art at Our Fingertips: How Covid-19 Accelerated the Digitization of Culture | CBC News,” CBCnews (CBC/Radio Canada, May 8, 2021), https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/digitization-culture-pandemic-1.6015861.
2. “Show Me the Monet - Google Arts & Culture,” Google (Google), accessed September 3, 2022, https://artsandculture.google.com/story/yAUh79Qtnpb8bA.
3. Brian Boucher, “'Emily in Paris' Fueled a Frenzy for Immersive Van Gogh 'Experiences.' Now a Consumer Watchdog Is Issuing a Warning about NYC's Dueling Shows,” Artnet News, March 16, 2021, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/immersive-van-gogh-better-business-bureau-1951887.
4. Christina Morales, “Immersive Van Gogh Experiences Bloom like Sunflowers,” The New York Times (The New York Times, March 7, 2021), https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/07/arts/design/van-gogh-immersive-experiences.html.
5. Jay Pfeifer, “'Immersive Van Gogh' Has Upsides and Downsides, Explains Art Prof,” Davidson, accessed September 3, 2022, https://www.davidson.edu/news/2021/04/16/immersive-van-gogh-has-upsides-and-downsides-explains-art-prof.
6. Anna Wiener, “The Rise of ‘Immersive’ Art,” The New Yorker, February 10, 2022, https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/the-rise-and-rise-of-immersive-art.
7. “You Can Now Practice Yoga within the Immersive Van Gogh Exhibit in San Antonio,” KSAT (KSAT San Antonio, August 12, 2022), https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2022/08/12/you-can-now-practice-yoga-within-the-immersive-van-gogh-exhibit-in-san-antonio/.
When restrictions did ease up in the second-half of 2020, the spaces which were available for much of the world were more open environs where physical distancing was easy and air circulation was better. It was about this time that 'immersive exhibits' exploded in cities across North America and Europe. Largely hosted in industrial spaces, these shows permitted distancing through projections of works onto the walls of a space, creating an 'immersive experience' by having attendees be subsumed by an artwork or its constituent components. There's an argument to be made that 2020's Netflix series Emily in Paris aided the exponential growth of these shows as a consequence of the Netflix Effect, but even with this as a contributing factors, the omnipresence of these exhibits seems inexplicable.³ Nonetheless, the directors of these shows and artist foundations have claimed that this maximal approach to the works of Vincent van Gogh in particular assist in understanding the artist on a more personal level, as if viewers will see the world as the artist did, will understand the machinations of their mind prior to their death.⁴ Even ignoring the fact that this is an impossibility, to understand the lived experience of another, this perpetuates the masturbatory romanticisation of the tortured 'other,' without engaging with their purported experience in a critical manner. This ballooning of the work may induce a sense of being 'inside' the painting, but it also means turning the work of an artist known for their impasto and its consequent three-dimensionality into a flat image. Beyond this, the poor quality of a projected image in relation to a physical work means those brushstrokes won't even appear on the walls of a space, just as they won't on the screen of a phone.⁵ My problem with these exhibits is not with idea of simulacra of the works themselves, but with this glorified and yet dehumanised reproduction, claiming to be focused on the personal history of the work while losing the humanity and physical deliberation of the paintings' creation. The immersive experience has nothing to do with the works themselves, but with the idea of the work, allowing us to say we were there rather than we saw.⁶ And in the wake of the success and proliferation of these van Gogh shows, we are now inundated with these $50 multi-sensory experiences for Klimt, for Monet, for Chagall, for Picasso, for Tutankhamen, for Frida Kahlo (who I'm sure would have loved the commodification of her work for vapid consumption by white people). The presence of pre-recorded vague statements and the wafting stench of cypress brings as much to the experience of viewing these low quality images as South Park: The Fractured But Whole's promotion stunt the Nosulus Rift did by letting you smell farts. These shows claim to complement the physical gallery experience but they merely detract. What impetus is there to gaze upon a work in person when influencers claim this is superior to the rinky-dink painting, when one can state with the authentic belief that they have already seen it, when you can go do yoga in a painting!?⁷
With it made abundantly clear now how much I detest the idea of the immersive experience, it must come as surprising that I was rather taken by this low-tech educational multimedia game from 1998 of all things. If the immersive exhibit is something I consider almost infantilising, how could this fare better? What Mission Sunlight has going for it immediately is that it isn't trying to pass itself off as some truest means of taking in van Gogh's work. The intro cinematic makes it evident that this is not the world of van Gogh, but some dystopic strangereal where the sun has gone out, taking with it the colour of the artist's paintings.
Our first interaction is with an on-the-fritz robot who gives us a magical star and makes it abundantly clear that despite his algorithmic attempts at restoring the paintings, he crucially has never been able to see the paintings up close. When we inspect the sprite of Fourteen Sunflowers in a Vase, we are welcomed by a polygonal representation of the artist himself. Rather than be some depressed bastardisation of our posthumous reinterpretation of van Gogh, this avatar is almost chipper in his sun hat. He invites us to use the magnifying class button, and when we do we get an incredibly close-up look at the painting and the brushstrokes on the canvas. A 115MB title from two decades past renders this human aspect more concrete than the supposed technological marvels of our present day can. Furthermore, you can click another button to have van Gogh hold up the painting so you can understand its scale.
Walking through the exhibit space, not only are the walls a disgusting hue of dentist-office beige, but they are dirty and in disrepair. The paintings are grey-scale, and even the vases which should be abound with almond blossoms are little more than collections of gnarled branches. Clicking on these paintings transports the player 'into' them, and here they are shown in colour. The subject matter is therein rendered three-dimensional and the player can move their perspective to see beyond the confines of the painting. What is particularly endearing about this is how the dithered textures impart a quasi-Impressionist feel despite being a limitation of technology. Instead of hearing lilting violins, the soundscape is realistic. Roosters crow, the wind blows, leaves tumble to the ground. In each painting you need to find an object to restore the colour, and certain interactables help you proceed. For Cottage with Decrepit Barn and Stooping Woman, one can actually enter the slanted building only for the interior to be the selfsame from The Potato Eaters, with the table embodying Still Life with an Earthen Bowl with Potatoes. Obviously some liberties have been taken in order to create these more singular, cohesive spaces, but it helps to demonstrate that these paintings were not created in a vacuum, and in fact were inspired by similar, if not identical, settings. These early works are of the same earthen hues in game as they are in reality, contrasted against a gorgeous blue sky.
Finding a potato for Still Life with an Earthen Bowl with Potatoes bestows upon us an educational tidbit of context, that still life paintings are historically flowing with finest dining ware and ostentatious displays of food, representing wealth and bounty. We swirl around Jan Davidszoon de Heem's Still-Life with Fruit and Lobster before van Gogh tells us his desire to show the food of the poor and demonstrate this connection between dining ware from the earth, and tubers from the earth in a display of realist honesty. Restoring The Potato Eaters tells us that it is difficult to break with what you have been told to do. Though this is obviously in response to academic traditions as taught to classically trained artists at Paris' École des Beaux-Arts, it resonates with me because of those immersive experiences. In a sense, those exhibits have broken with the expected, but they have also perpetuated that consumptive mode which snaps a picture and moves on, akin to an Instagram trap. In Mission Sunlight, the tradition of the art gallery has been eschewed for a different maximal approach which at times demonstrates a falsehood about these works through the artistic liberties of an imagined 3D space, but by also teaching directly without shoving contexts onto a placard, a catalogue, or an art history education. Maybe this gamification of art is itself problematic too, but as an edutainment piece of software I am more forgiving.
When we venture into The Night Cafe, I am apprehensive because of my time with 2016's The Night Cafe: A VR Tribute to Van Gogh. That grotesquerie attempted to bring multiple works into one space in a manner I would consider a failure, those other works managing to detract from titular cafe. The scale of the people made it especially hard to immerse myself in, but thankfully Mission Sunlight opted to remove those figures entirely. The geometries here are simpler and more angular, but it weirdly works. Instead of the yellow smears of smooth brushwork in A VR Tribute coming off the lamps, Mission Sunlight's lamps take the actual brushwork of The Night Cafe and turn them into quasi-3D sprites, like a tree in Super Mario 64 to much greater effect. A VR Tribute is a strangely disconnected sensory experience. Mission Sunlight inundates the player with the din of cafe culture, clocks ticking away incessantly, indistinct conversation washing over us.
The later part of van Gogh's life is, understandably, much less depressing here than in reality. Stepping into the Hospital at Arles series, we can hear the anguished cries of the patients who are again not depicted, but the commentary avoids sounding downtrodden. Van Gogh himself speaks of the proliferation of Japanese art and Japonisme when we restore Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, rather than wallow in misery. Ward in the Hospital in Arles' commentary touches on the unappreciative response to his art, but again it isn't masturbatory, but informative. We see van Gogh not as a man defined by mental illness, but simply as a man who wished to paint. Though this is painting too simple of a portrait in many ways, it also helpfully avoids the pratfalls of the contemporary imagining of van Gogh.
Mission Sunlight warms the cockles of my heart in a way I didn't expect it to at all. It is simply a good piece of edutainment software which is informative in a way I wouldn't expect of a children's approach to art history. It is refreshing and truthfully immersive in rendering paintings as physical spaces, rather than as flat images on a wall. It evokes an honesty to the painted work that is astounding for 1998, and serves as a phenomenal alternative to AR experiences or digital catalogues. This is a work which expects willful engagement, and rewards it handsomely. I wholeheartedly recommend downloading a copy and running this in a VM if you have the slightest interest in art history.
1. Alexander Panetta, “A World of Art at Our Fingertips: How Covid-19 Accelerated the Digitization of Culture | CBC News,” CBCnews (CBC/Radio Canada, May 8, 2021), https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/digitization-culture-pandemic-1.6015861.
2. “Show Me the Monet - Google Arts & Culture,” Google (Google), accessed September 3, 2022, https://artsandculture.google.com/story/yAUh79Qtnpb8bA.
3. Brian Boucher, “'Emily in Paris' Fueled a Frenzy for Immersive Van Gogh 'Experiences.' Now a Consumer Watchdog Is Issuing a Warning about NYC's Dueling Shows,” Artnet News, March 16, 2021, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/immersive-van-gogh-better-business-bureau-1951887.
4. Christina Morales, “Immersive Van Gogh Experiences Bloom like Sunflowers,” The New York Times (The New York Times, March 7, 2021), https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/07/arts/design/van-gogh-immersive-experiences.html.
5. Jay Pfeifer, “'Immersive Van Gogh' Has Upsides and Downsides, Explains Art Prof,” Davidson, accessed September 3, 2022, https://www.davidson.edu/news/2021/04/16/immersive-van-gogh-has-upsides-and-downsides-explains-art-prof.
6. Anna Wiener, “The Rise of ‘Immersive’ Art,” The New Yorker, February 10, 2022, https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/the-rise-and-rise-of-immersive-art.
7. “You Can Now Practice Yoga within the Immersive Van Gogh Exhibit in San Antonio,” KSAT (KSAT San Antonio, August 12, 2022), https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2022/08/12/you-can-now-practice-yoga-within-the-immersive-van-gogh-exhibit-in-san-antonio/.
2018
The video game equivalent of a Jimmy Neutron brain blast.
The combined discographies of SOPHIE, Arca, Andy Stott, and Iglooghost infused with Gravity Rush amidst the geometries of Kairo, INTRAQUARTZ, and Uncut Gems' black opal sequences.
Not a wasted moment. Intense visuals and a thumping, reactive soundscape enshroud topsy-turvy platforming like the miasmatic decadence of Berghain. The dizzying speed of some sequences invokes free-fall in one's chair. No bullshit. Just the infinities of matter itself.
The combined discographies of SOPHIE, Arca, Andy Stott, and Iglooghost infused with Gravity Rush amidst the geometries of Kairo, INTRAQUARTZ, and Uncut Gems' black opal sequences.
Not a wasted moment. Intense visuals and a thumping, reactive soundscape enshroud topsy-turvy platforming like the miasmatic decadence of Berghain. The dizzying speed of some sequences invokes free-fall in one's chair. No bullshit. Just the infinities of matter itself.
2017
Outstanding as a showcase for Cosmo D's musical talents, ineffectual in every other regard. The Norwood Suite represents a turning point for Cosmo D's oeuvre towards commercialisation and an acceptability for the gaming masses. The wide-open amorphous slapdash spaces of Off-Peak have been cast aside in favour of regimented, interconnected spaces which ultimately refuse the possibility of wasted time and effort on the part of the player. That isn't to say that earning money for your labour is bad. Rather, there is a sense of sterility in presentation and experience.
Though Off-Peak allowed the player total freedom in their approach to collecting their ticket pieces, The Norwood Suite has a fairly prescriptive path in place for progression. Some items may be found off the beaten path, but the primary objective feels at times like railroading -- ironic given it was the previous game which featured trains. The widespread, warm reception of The Norwood Suite in comparison to the non-coverage of works of Oleander Garden, TIMEframe, or 0_abyssalSomewhere exemplifies my issue with the former; it is off-beat, 'outsider' art presented in a manner which is palatable to non-outsiders.
To pilfer the thoughts of our greatest mind, "Cosmo D reminds me of Mr Brainwash." Like Mr. Brainwash or Banksy, there feels to be a sort of appropriation of the work by those on the periphery of the core game/art world. Cosmo D's human are of malformed flesh less to make some grander point of bodily discomfort and dysmorphia, but to come across as too weird to be uncanny, too ordinary to be anything but human. This holds true throughout the experience, striking me less as the autonomy of the self as actualised in Second Life, and more like the interpretation of that digitised Other by one who exists as an observer, a trouble maker, a mocker. By way of example, The Norwood Suite is Griffin and Justin McElroy's intentional grotesqueries made for their corporate sponsored, lampooning of the Other in their Second Life Monster Factory videos. It is insincere. Superficially about something, but altogether hollow.
Though Off-Peak allowed the player total freedom in their approach to collecting their ticket pieces, The Norwood Suite has a fairly prescriptive path in place for progression. Some items may be found off the beaten path, but the primary objective feels at times like railroading -- ironic given it was the previous game which featured trains. The widespread, warm reception of The Norwood Suite in comparison to the non-coverage of works of Oleander Garden, TIMEframe, or 0_abyssalSomewhere exemplifies my issue with the former; it is off-beat, 'outsider' art presented in a manner which is palatable to non-outsiders.
To pilfer the thoughts of our greatest mind, "Cosmo D reminds me of Mr Brainwash." Like Mr. Brainwash or Banksy, there feels to be a sort of appropriation of the work by those on the periphery of the core game/art world. Cosmo D's human are of malformed flesh less to make some grander point of bodily discomfort and dysmorphia, but to come across as too weird to be uncanny, too ordinary to be anything but human. This holds true throughout the experience, striking me less as the autonomy of the self as actualised in Second Life, and more like the interpretation of that digitised Other by one who exists as an observer, a trouble maker, a mocker. By way of example, The Norwood Suite is Griffin and Justin McElroy's intentional grotesqueries made for their corporate sponsored, lampooning of the Other in their Second Life Monster Factory videos. It is insincere. Superficially about something, but altogether hollow.
A very rough introduction to Klonoa.
As an early WonderSwan title, and Namco's first game on the system, I admittedly didn't expect too much. The core platforming is passable, and the alteration of Klonoa's gameplay to fit a smaller-scale, action puzzle romp works surprisingly well (though I have no knowledge of what changes were actually made to that end). Getting the moonshards to finish each level is straight forward, with increasingly difficult puzzles required to get all the dream shards in a level for 100%.
There is an apparent attempt at replicating the graphical fidelity of the first PlayStation title, with the level/graphic designers assuring fans they worked hard to that end. Despite those efforts, the backgrounds blur together in such a way that, during actual play, the parallax effects are not noticed or registered even subconsciously. Foreground elements are detailed and make good use of the eight tones of grey, but their size on an already minuscule screen leads to a great deal of remembering level layouts, particularly when juggling crates across an entire section. One of the developers allegedly proposed shrinking Klonoa's (and presumably all other) sprites to accommodate the fact some levels were made for TATE play. Those TATE levels are an interesting feature in theory, but those stages rarely take advantage of that focus on verticality. If anything, they are more frustrating due to limited horizontal screen real estate mixed with lateral challenges.
The misunderstanding of the hardware continues with the sound. Afforded only four audio channels and a dreadfully tinny speaker, Hiromi Shibano and Junko Ozawa wanted to ensure Klonoa's iconic "Wahoo!" would be reproduced. It is a valiant effort on Ozawa's part in particular, with the digitised speech coming through fairly clearly, but the constant yelping detracts from the already stifled music and sound design as every possibly resource is thrown at Klonoa's voice. On top of that, what music can be heard is innocuous at first, but agonising when heard non-stop for all six stages of a world. And that is in an ideal scenario, wherein the player has access to the WonderSwan's headphone adapter accessory. The puny speaker has the potential to output genuinely good sound, but everything clashes harshly in Moonlight Museum.
From what I've read, the Game Boy Advance entries are a marked improvement. With a greater understanding of the WonderSwan's peculiarities following Namco's other releases on the platform (as well as the later addition of colour) there was considerable potential for Klonoa to be great on WonderSwan. However, he was given no second chance here, effectively using the WonderSwan as he would an enemy, discarding it to reach a higher level.
As an early WonderSwan title, and Namco's first game on the system, I admittedly didn't expect too much. The core platforming is passable, and the alteration of Klonoa's gameplay to fit a smaller-scale, action puzzle romp works surprisingly well (though I have no knowledge of what changes were actually made to that end). Getting the moonshards to finish each level is straight forward, with increasingly difficult puzzles required to get all the dream shards in a level for 100%.
There is an apparent attempt at replicating the graphical fidelity of the first PlayStation title, with the level/graphic designers assuring fans they worked hard to that end. Despite those efforts, the backgrounds blur together in such a way that, during actual play, the parallax effects are not noticed or registered even subconsciously. Foreground elements are detailed and make good use of the eight tones of grey, but their size on an already minuscule screen leads to a great deal of remembering level layouts, particularly when juggling crates across an entire section. One of the developers allegedly proposed shrinking Klonoa's (and presumably all other) sprites to accommodate the fact some levels were made for TATE play. Those TATE levels are an interesting feature in theory, but those stages rarely take advantage of that focus on verticality. If anything, they are more frustrating due to limited horizontal screen real estate mixed with lateral challenges.
The misunderstanding of the hardware continues with the sound. Afforded only four audio channels and a dreadfully tinny speaker, Hiromi Shibano and Junko Ozawa wanted to ensure Klonoa's iconic "Wahoo!" would be reproduced. It is a valiant effort on Ozawa's part in particular, with the digitised speech coming through fairly clearly, but the constant yelping detracts from the already stifled music and sound design as every possibly resource is thrown at Klonoa's voice. On top of that, what music can be heard is innocuous at first, but agonising when heard non-stop for all six stages of a world. And that is in an ideal scenario, wherein the player has access to the WonderSwan's headphone adapter accessory. The puny speaker has the potential to output genuinely good sound, but everything clashes harshly in Moonlight Museum.
From what I've read, the Game Boy Advance entries are a marked improvement. With a greater understanding of the WonderSwan's peculiarities following Namco's other releases on the platform (as well as the later addition of colour) there was considerable potential for Klonoa to be great on WonderSwan. However, he was given no second chance here, effectively using the WonderSwan as he would an enemy, discarding it to reach a higher level.
As an analog to John George Jones' ZX Spectrum titles I think this works rather well. The trouble with those games is how tedious and difficult they are, taking a half-hour of, frankly, impeccable play to finish if you know where to go. But Go to Hell and Soft & Cuddly aren't noteworthy for their mechanical depth or how fun they are. Go to Hell was made purely for Jones' own amusement, both games functioning as a showcase for the creative liberties allowed by the microcomputer boom of the early 80s. They are theoretically great because of their juvenile nature, but seeing more of Jones' inner machinations requires you to play and play well, a frustrating endeavour.
Fucker Gamer Scum Get Stabbed cannot even hope to replicate that moment of novelty in creative expression. Imagery that was once shocking has become quaint, in gaming and apart from it. Jones' works were from a time before Andres Serrano's Piss Christ and Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary, before the grotesque literature of Chuck Palahniuk, Bret Easton Ellis, and Irvine Welsh, when imagery of deformed children and smashed skulls were associated with the depraved minds of arthouses.
Fucker Gamer Scum Get Stabbed exists in a world where these deliberate transgressions rarely faze the chronically online mind. What is offensive is how it controls, a blistering interpretation of Soft & Cuddly's floaty platforming given the momentum of Lunar Lander. Death in Jones' games meant either labouriously beginning again from the start, or reviving in a nearby screen, but here the player quickly continues from where they died, a great concession. The interwoven screens of Jones' games are vaguely simulated, but perhaps to exacerbate their labyrinthine atmosphere, they illogically connect and disconnect from one another seemingly at random in Fucker Gamer Scum Get Stabbed. The oddities of it all wind down incredibly fast, thankfully, with the player getting to the end seemingly at random. Fucker Gamer Scum Get Stabbed is like an amuse-bouche of Jones' work, a decent recreation of the idea of those games without their punch.
Recommended by maradona as part of [this list]
Fucker Gamer Scum Get Stabbed cannot even hope to replicate that moment of novelty in creative expression. Imagery that was once shocking has become quaint, in gaming and apart from it. Jones' works were from a time before Andres Serrano's Piss Christ and Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary, before the grotesque literature of Chuck Palahniuk, Bret Easton Ellis, and Irvine Welsh, when imagery of deformed children and smashed skulls were associated with the depraved minds of arthouses.
Fucker Gamer Scum Get Stabbed exists in a world where these deliberate transgressions rarely faze the chronically online mind. What is offensive is how it controls, a blistering interpretation of Soft & Cuddly's floaty platforming given the momentum of Lunar Lander. Death in Jones' games meant either labouriously beginning again from the start, or reviving in a nearby screen, but here the player quickly continues from where they died, a great concession. The interwoven screens of Jones' games are vaguely simulated, but perhaps to exacerbate their labyrinthine atmosphere, they illogically connect and disconnect from one another seemingly at random in Fucker Gamer Scum Get Stabbed. The oddities of it all wind down incredibly fast, thankfully, with the player getting to the end seemingly at random. Fucker Gamer Scum Get Stabbed is like an amuse-bouche of Jones' work, a decent recreation of the idea of those games without their punch.
Recommended by maradona as part of [this list]
2022
Given my stance on Vampire Survivors it might surprise folks to find out I actually rather enjoy Soulstone Survivors in its current iteration. I don't feel it necessary to go super deep into it so here are some jumbled thoughts as a comparison to VS:
The addition of attacks outside of bullets and contact damage is fantastic, especially with telegraphed AOEs. Coupled with your dodge there is an actual skill floor here, even if it can be reduced to 'don't stand in red'.
Skills are incredibly diverse and allow for a wide array of builds. That you can swap out your six active skills as desired lessens the possibility of thinking you made a poor choice. Having theoretically infinite passive skills also makes builds more flexible if needed.
Breaking those skills into sub-categories makes it easy to understand how they might interact cohesively. If I get a passive skill that increases the area or damage of my Slam skills, I'm more compelled to get more Slam skills which themselves might synthesise well through their Physical typing or Hemorrhage debuffs.
The focus on getting run times down, rather than just surviving for thirty minutes encourages more offensive-oriented play which is more engaging and wastes less time. With less focus on defence and more attention given to offence and dodging, skilful play is more important than turtling.
Curses (at least below 25) lead to a more dynamic game session that also lets you power up faster in a way that's very fun. Having multiple elites spawn at once makes them delicious XP sources. I've read that curses get out of control at the high end but I haven't yet encountered that.
Getting your run time down lets you continue the run in another level with far greater difficulty and rewards, but also a lowered enemy kill requirement for bosses. I can't say how much this is offset by the increased stats of enemies but it seems to get faster and faster.
The rune system, though laborious to fully unlock, allows you to mix and match different characters' skill sets and generally mix up your playstyle much more than VS ever did or does.
On the whole, Soulstone Survivors is pretty damn good (for a Survivors-like) thus far. I find it kind of similar to doing Nephalem Rifts in Diablo III: Reaper of Souls, particularly as your build snowballs into absurdity. That it circumvents my two biggest gripes with Survivors-likes (time investment and lack of player agency) has me hopeful other developers chasing this trend follow in Soulstone Survivors' steps rather than Vampire Survivors'.
The addition of attacks outside of bullets and contact damage is fantastic, especially with telegraphed AOEs. Coupled with your dodge there is an actual skill floor here, even if it can be reduced to 'don't stand in red'.
Skills are incredibly diverse and allow for a wide array of builds. That you can swap out your six active skills as desired lessens the possibility of thinking you made a poor choice. Having theoretically infinite passive skills also makes builds more flexible if needed.
Breaking those skills into sub-categories makes it easy to understand how they might interact cohesively. If I get a passive skill that increases the area or damage of my Slam skills, I'm more compelled to get more Slam skills which themselves might synthesise well through their Physical typing or Hemorrhage debuffs.
The focus on getting run times down, rather than just surviving for thirty minutes encourages more offensive-oriented play which is more engaging and wastes less time. With less focus on defence and more attention given to offence and dodging, skilful play is more important than turtling.
Curses (at least below 25) lead to a more dynamic game session that also lets you power up faster in a way that's very fun. Having multiple elites spawn at once makes them delicious XP sources. I've read that curses get out of control at the high end but I haven't yet encountered that.
Getting your run time down lets you continue the run in another level with far greater difficulty and rewards, but also a lowered enemy kill requirement for bosses. I can't say how much this is offset by the increased stats of enemies but it seems to get faster and faster.
The rune system, though laborious to fully unlock, allows you to mix and match different characters' skill sets and generally mix up your playstyle much more than VS ever did or does.
On the whole, Soulstone Survivors is pretty damn good (for a Survivors-like) thus far. I find it kind of similar to doing Nephalem Rifts in Diablo III: Reaper of Souls, particularly as your build snowballs into absurdity. That it circumvents my two biggest gripes with Survivors-likes (time investment and lack of player agency) has me hopeful other developers chasing this trend follow in Soulstone Survivors' steps rather than Vampire Survivors'.
1990
Pretty good erotic pixel art under a tissue paper-thin veil of gameplay that is outclassed by nearly the entire X68000 library. You walk forward in a straight line, enemies spawn in abundance in front of and behind you, you punch or kick them, repeat until you get to a boss. The grotesque disfigurements of these putty women in the core game belie the print materials and slideshow rewards for beating a stage. Though ostensibly these are lesbian displays of lewdness, they cater to the male gaze with laser precision with both parties taking on stances of submission and presentation towards the camera.
Not that this a-phallic focus is of any surprise. Published under the Technopolis Soft label, a software imprint of Tokuma Shoten's Technopolis magazine, this material reflects the contents of this and other Japanese PC enthusiast magazines of the 80s and 90s. Whether it's Technopolis, POPCOM, LOGiN, these magazines and their ilk catered to an overwhelmingly male readership. Entire sections of these and other magazines were devoted to eroge, gravure photoshoots, and erotic manga. In Guerrière Lyewärd, as in Technopolis itself, lesbian imagery is not on display as a means of some liberation for repressed women loving women in Japan, but a fetishistic object for heterosexual consumption. These women are crazed nymphomaniacs in need of a satiation which never comes.
Pornography aside, this is one of the shallowest eroge I've ever played, both in terms of erotic content and the gameplay itself. I thought maybe it was a type-in game, or a pack-in from a Technopolis appendix. No! It physically released! It cost 6800円! That's around $110USD today! That's like $5 for every 'lewd' image, goddamn!!!
Not that this a-phallic focus is of any surprise. Published under the Technopolis Soft label, a software imprint of Tokuma Shoten's Technopolis magazine, this material reflects the contents of this and other Japanese PC enthusiast magazines of the 80s and 90s. Whether it's Technopolis, POPCOM, LOGiN, these magazines and their ilk catered to an overwhelmingly male readership. Entire sections of these and other magazines were devoted to eroge, gravure photoshoots, and erotic manga. In Guerrière Lyewärd, as in Technopolis itself, lesbian imagery is not on display as a means of some liberation for repressed women loving women in Japan, but a fetishistic object for heterosexual consumption. These women are crazed nymphomaniacs in need of a satiation which never comes.
Pornography aside, this is one of the shallowest eroge I've ever played, both in terms of erotic content and the gameplay itself. I thought maybe it was a type-in game, or a pack-in from a Technopolis appendix. No! It physically released! It cost 6800円! That's around $110USD today! That's like $5 for every 'lewd' image, goddamn!!!
2021
Wrought Flesh is held together by rotting sinew and prayer. It is mechanically and aesthetically grotesque. It tears itself apart with ambition and harbours more bugs than maggot-ridden offal. It is wholly unique despite being comprised of incongruous parts sewn into a Frankensteinian mass. It is a casu martzu, off-putting in nearly every regard but a delicacy for a select few.
The core of Wrought Flesh is simple. Pursue your prey and assimilate viscera into your body cavity along the way. Organs function like gear in a typical RPG but rather than be assigned slots, they take up a certain number of spaces within your body like Resident Evil. Further complicating matters is the fact your organs deteriorate through use; imbibing corpses wears down your intestines, healing over time breaks your heart, taking bullets fills your fat with holes. Some items lack durability but these are typically unique and come with some other caveat which will more likely than not make your other organs rot even faster. For example, a literal iron lung bestows massive agility but tanks your HP regen, making your heart(s) work harder and wither quicker. The player is constantly on the hunt for new organs to replace aging ones. This weaves a rapid gameplay loop where caution is typically thrown to the wind to kill enemies before your body fails. Parts can even be swapped in combat, but good luck playing inventory Tetris with bugs flying at your face. An option to quickly replace organs could have made the process of mending oneself mid-fight a smoother experience, but the current system of risk-reward works well enough. Organs can also be eschewed to leave space in your body cavity to hold more ammo and Killfuck. I, however, saw the cons of not having those stats to heavily outweigh doubling my reserves.
Organs are central to Wrought Flesh's Bio system. Some guns use blood instead of bullets for ammunition. As such, higher health pools mean a greater supply of shots, higher regen rates ensure leeched vitality is recuperated faster. Organs can also have elemental attributes like Fire, Electricity, Acid, or Explosive. While those impart resistance to their respective damage types, they also imbue Bio weapons with damage of that type. Bio weapons are greatly customisable as a result, able to exploit the weaknesses of some foes should the player have the appropriate organs. Even without picking up Bio weapons, the player always has their Finger Gun available should they throw their weapon to the floor, so in a pinch those elements still come into play, and this is in fact critical to defeating enemies which resist bullet damage. Elemental organs invariably occupy an inconvenient amount of space in your body cavity, which helps keep Bio in relative lockstep with weapon upgrades, neither becoming greatly stronger than the other.
Aiding the blistering pace of Wrought Flesh is a skiing system straight out of Tribes, though it leaves something to be desired. Without the jets of Tribes, momentum vanishes when hitting an upward slope. A high agility stat helps by giving you a greater jump and speed to simply leap over hills, but without enough agility you're going to be walking uphill a lot. One quirk of the engine is that your falling speed is taken into account when you start skiing, so jumping from a monstrous height onto flat terrain leads to ludicrous speeds.
The map design is effectively a series of spiderwebs, a central town stretching into small areas every which way for encounters and quest objectives. The lack of a map screen and repetitious environments would ordinarily cause navigational confusion. However, since there is invariably a separate objective in each of the cardinal and ordinal directions, and quest destinations are expressed as belonging to those directions, it is difficult to get lost. Those quests are also pretty damn simple for the most part, being in the vein of kill these enemies, get these key items. Some break the mould by offering a choice or requiring the player to carry certain organs in one piece to a destination.
Wrought Flesh's world is no masterwork of worldbuilding and lore, but the snippets of exposition gleaned from dialogue are engrossing enough and paint a portrait of disturbing dystopian surrealism in the tradition of H.R. Giger and Zdzisław Beksiński. In this land it is not only the bleeding flesh which is worshipped, but the euphemistic as well, the player character often rewarded for their efforts with a satiation of carnal appetites.
These constituent parts are rather incongruous at times, but Wrought Flesh is a perfect melange of grotesquerie for me, a Cruelty Squad I can gel with, a Brigand: Oaxaca of a different flavour.
Regrettably I am presently softlocked due to crashing on load, a shame since I loved what I was able to play.
The core of Wrought Flesh is simple. Pursue your prey and assimilate viscera into your body cavity along the way. Organs function like gear in a typical RPG but rather than be assigned slots, they take up a certain number of spaces within your body like Resident Evil. Further complicating matters is the fact your organs deteriorate through use; imbibing corpses wears down your intestines, healing over time breaks your heart, taking bullets fills your fat with holes. Some items lack durability but these are typically unique and come with some other caveat which will more likely than not make your other organs rot even faster. For example, a literal iron lung bestows massive agility but tanks your HP regen, making your heart(s) work harder and wither quicker. The player is constantly on the hunt for new organs to replace aging ones. This weaves a rapid gameplay loop where caution is typically thrown to the wind to kill enemies before your body fails. Parts can even be swapped in combat, but good luck playing inventory Tetris with bugs flying at your face. An option to quickly replace organs could have made the process of mending oneself mid-fight a smoother experience, but the current system of risk-reward works well enough. Organs can also be eschewed to leave space in your body cavity to hold more ammo and Killfuck. I, however, saw the cons of not having those stats to heavily outweigh doubling my reserves.
Organs are central to Wrought Flesh's Bio system. Some guns use blood instead of bullets for ammunition. As such, higher health pools mean a greater supply of shots, higher regen rates ensure leeched vitality is recuperated faster. Organs can also have elemental attributes like Fire, Electricity, Acid, or Explosive. While those impart resistance to their respective damage types, they also imbue Bio weapons with damage of that type. Bio weapons are greatly customisable as a result, able to exploit the weaknesses of some foes should the player have the appropriate organs. Even without picking up Bio weapons, the player always has their Finger Gun available should they throw their weapon to the floor, so in a pinch those elements still come into play, and this is in fact critical to defeating enemies which resist bullet damage. Elemental organs invariably occupy an inconvenient amount of space in your body cavity, which helps keep Bio in relative lockstep with weapon upgrades, neither becoming greatly stronger than the other.
Aiding the blistering pace of Wrought Flesh is a skiing system straight out of Tribes, though it leaves something to be desired. Without the jets of Tribes, momentum vanishes when hitting an upward slope. A high agility stat helps by giving you a greater jump and speed to simply leap over hills, but without enough agility you're going to be walking uphill a lot. One quirk of the engine is that your falling speed is taken into account when you start skiing, so jumping from a monstrous height onto flat terrain leads to ludicrous speeds.
The map design is effectively a series of spiderwebs, a central town stretching into small areas every which way for encounters and quest objectives. The lack of a map screen and repetitious environments would ordinarily cause navigational confusion. However, since there is invariably a separate objective in each of the cardinal and ordinal directions, and quest destinations are expressed as belonging to those directions, it is difficult to get lost. Those quests are also pretty damn simple for the most part, being in the vein of kill these enemies, get these key items. Some break the mould by offering a choice or requiring the player to carry certain organs in one piece to a destination.
Wrought Flesh's world is no masterwork of worldbuilding and lore, but the snippets of exposition gleaned from dialogue are engrossing enough and paint a portrait of disturbing dystopian surrealism in the tradition of H.R. Giger and Zdzisław Beksiński. In this land it is not only the bleeding flesh which is worshipped, but the euphemistic as well, the player character often rewarded for their efforts with a satiation of carnal appetites.
These constituent parts are rather incongruous at times, but Wrought Flesh is a perfect melange of grotesquerie for me, a Cruelty Squad I can gel with, a Brigand: Oaxaca of a different flavour.
Regrettably I am presently softlocked due to crashing on load, a shame since I loved what I was able to play.
I am not so ignorant as to sweep Blizzard's malpractices under the rug for the sake of my own enjoyment. Even ignoring the well-known laundry list of human-facing controversies in recent years, their products have dwindled in appeal to me for over a decade. As lamented in my retrospective on Wrath of the Lich King, much of the core identity of World of Warcraft has languished as it is torn apart at the seams by its players, and haphazardly sewn back together with every expansion. My favourite part of Overwatch was quickly dismantled in favour of supposed balance, a Sisyphean treadmill. Hearthstone crumbles under the weight of its power creep and enormity of knowledge required. Heroes of the Storm was left to wither on the vine. And Diablo III dropped from the heavens with a wet thud. So imagine my shock when Reaper of Souls rose from its ashes like a phoenix that hasn't gone out for over nine years now.
My love of World of Warcraft in particular was two-faced until the release of Shadowlands, the nail in the coffin for any fondness I still had for Azeroth. After completing the core expansion, I deleted Battle.net and never again felt the urge to revisit my account.
But Diablo III continued to call to me. And in a moment of weakness, finally bursting through my mental dam with the early access period for Diablo IV I caved, and felt and feel horrible for it. My scruples, irrelevant! Nothing has ever come close to the specific gameplay of Diablo III, and Diablo IV's beta suggests nothing ever will, not even Blizzard's own offerings.
What I adore about Diablo III is exactly what, arguably, makes it a bad ARPG. The combat is largely meaningless. Everything is item driven rather than character dependent. Builds are largely prescribed and difficult to tweak. There is next to no consequence outside of playing on Hardcore (which I have always exclusively done). Adventure Mode and its bounties are so linear it might as well occur in a hallway. Enemies might as well all be the same. Bosses have no interesting mechanics in end-game scenarios. Legendaries inundate the player to the point where you stop even picking them up. The grinding for Primal Ancients is absurd.
I love it all!
Diablo III is a constant that has been with me for over a decade, through good and bad. I have always known I could return to it for a few days or a week, click things, have them explode, and revel in its own chaos. My characters' deaths rarely bother me, if anything they instill in me a drive to do it all over again. Take bigger risks with my build to get back to speed. Try new gear sets with radically different modes of play (even if the end result is always one-shotting everything even on Torment XVI). In an era of games which try for balance above all else, Diablo III has leaned entirely into the fact that a game of its sort is unable to be balanced. Each Season amps up the absurdity of some small factor, showering the player in loot or damage numbers or some other quirk that widens my eyes. And this latest go around, Season 28, has taken this to what must be a maximal realisation. The new altar destroys any remaining shreds of balance and gets the player as close as possible to basically using a trainer.
I adore it, and I truly missed it. My time with the season is probably at an end, but I will likely return. If not for the next one, then some other season down the line. I'll shake my head the whole time then, just as I did now, so everyone knows I disagree.
My love of World of Warcraft in particular was two-faced until the release of Shadowlands, the nail in the coffin for any fondness I still had for Azeroth. After completing the core expansion, I deleted Battle.net and never again felt the urge to revisit my account.
But Diablo III continued to call to me. And in a moment of weakness, finally bursting through my mental dam with the early access period for Diablo IV I caved, and felt and feel horrible for it. My scruples, irrelevant! Nothing has ever come close to the specific gameplay of Diablo III, and Diablo IV's beta suggests nothing ever will, not even Blizzard's own offerings.
What I adore about Diablo III is exactly what, arguably, makes it a bad ARPG. The combat is largely meaningless. Everything is item driven rather than character dependent. Builds are largely prescribed and difficult to tweak. There is next to no consequence outside of playing on Hardcore (which I have always exclusively done). Adventure Mode and its bounties are so linear it might as well occur in a hallway. Enemies might as well all be the same. Bosses have no interesting mechanics in end-game scenarios. Legendaries inundate the player to the point where you stop even picking them up. The grinding for Primal Ancients is absurd.
I love it all!
Diablo III is a constant that has been with me for over a decade, through good and bad. I have always known I could return to it for a few days or a week, click things, have them explode, and revel in its own chaos. My characters' deaths rarely bother me, if anything they instill in me a drive to do it all over again. Take bigger risks with my build to get back to speed. Try new gear sets with radically different modes of play (even if the end result is always one-shotting everything even on Torment XVI). In an era of games which try for balance above all else, Diablo III has leaned entirely into the fact that a game of its sort is unable to be balanced. Each Season amps up the absurdity of some small factor, showering the player in loot or damage numbers or some other quirk that widens my eyes. And this latest go around, Season 28, has taken this to what must be a maximal realisation. The new altar destroys any remaining shreds of balance and gets the player as close as possible to basically using a trainer.
I adore it, and I truly missed it. My time with the season is probably at an end, but I will likely return. If not for the next one, then some other season down the line. I'll shake my head the whole time then, just as I did now, so everyone knows I disagree.
2007
While a DS port of the PS2 original was certain to be a mixed bag, it's still amazing how much this version of the game drops the ball. Every obstacle is dealt with by Cookie stepping on a button, and Cream doing an action on the touch screen or via the microphone. This leads to prolonged periods of Cookie standing still and having an enemy come after him to steal your time. Segmenting the game in this way would be fine, but without anything for Cookie to reasonably do, the player is left pacing awkwardly with one hand, tapping away with the other.
Either due to hardware limitations or its nature as a portable or because of the touchscreen implementation, levels are also much shorter and less dense than on PS2. There are fewer enemies and obstacles meaning many levels end before arriving at their meatiest parts. The Adventures of Cookie & Cream wasn't some exemplar of kishoutenketsu design like a modern Mario title, but there was still room for mechanics to flourish and interact more meaningfully than they can here.
Cookie & Cream never feels like the synthesis that the title implies, its two halves becoming as disparate as a tub of chocolate ice cream and one of vanilla placed next to each other in the freezer. Sure, they're together, but they have no bearing on each other. Even if it would betray some of the DS's appeal to get rid of the touchscreen functionality, a system closer to the PS2's single-player would work wonders, the left controls moving Cookie, the right, Cream. They could even have them remain on separate screens, perhaps eschew the big orange buttons and bring back the tangible object interaction? Or maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree, complaining about the single-player in a game meant for pairs, and I should just eat my deconstructed Oreos with a forced smile.
Either due to hardware limitations or its nature as a portable or because of the touchscreen implementation, levels are also much shorter and less dense than on PS2. There are fewer enemies and obstacles meaning many levels end before arriving at their meatiest parts. The Adventures of Cookie & Cream wasn't some exemplar of kishoutenketsu design like a modern Mario title, but there was still room for mechanics to flourish and interact more meaningfully than they can here.
Cookie & Cream never feels like the synthesis that the title implies, its two halves becoming as disparate as a tub of chocolate ice cream and one of vanilla placed next to each other in the freezer. Sure, they're together, but they have no bearing on each other. Even if it would betray some of the DS's appeal to get rid of the touchscreen functionality, a system closer to the PS2's single-player would work wonders, the left controls moving Cookie, the right, Cream. They could even have them remain on separate screens, perhaps eschew the big orange buttons and bring back the tangible object interaction? Or maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree, complaining about the single-player in a game meant for pairs, and I should just eat my deconstructed Oreos with a forced smile.
2019
After Technopolis and Emporium, I was immensely excited to delve into Autogeny. From the outset, however, Autogeny demonstrated with crystal clarity that it is not the work I wanted or expected it to be.
Much of this is no doubt due to my own misunderstanding of what the Pagan titles were trying to convey to me. Autogeny makes it explicit that the space the player delves into and reclaims are part of a dead MMO, something that never occured to me with the previous titles. Autogeny is undeniably about the trans (re)claiming of digital spaces. One of your skills is Estrogen, a character tells you that walls are little more than clandestine passages, Body Forging is levelled by appending thigh-high socks to a busty mannequin. I find those aspects fascinating, and fitting for a dead MMO. Not that I can speak with any authourity, but I think like with STG (keep in mind the top Battle Garegga player in the world is a trans woman), the appeal of trans/queer inquiries into the dead MMO space have to do with an a-communal appeal. For an MMO, here exists a land ostensibly populated with other people, real in the case of a 'living' MMO, a simulacra for a dead MMO. Those fictionalised representations of people don't harbour the same discriminatory sentiments that real players might. These false selves hate goblins and demons, not a real person's actual existence. One won't be called a slur for any number of reasons, these players become as ghosts in the machine, consuming that which is no longer considered suitable for consumption. And all of this is fantastic and deserves to be realised in a cohesive, singular gamespace that is agnostic of actual MMOs, I just don't think Autogeny operates well as that space.
The appeal of Technopolis and Emporium largely arose from the non-labelling of them as dead MMOs. The thought hadn't even occurred to me. The colour-banding grey miasma of Technopolis didn't strike me as a dead digital space, but as a non-place between life and death. The pervasiveness of John Atkinson Grimshaw's nocturnal urban purgatories and John William Waterhouse's The Magic Circle and Hylas with a Nymph made it plain to me that this was a time before death, a time of abduction, a time of awaiting a true end. The skills of Technopolis suggested responses to catastrophe, the grey concrete nothings mining away at cars a sort of coping through this transitory period. When rapture is on its way (or perhaps occurrent) would we not descend into a mad reverie of our silicon masters, or stoke the flames of seared flesh in the name of an urban scavenger? The accompanying player piano's ceaseless echoes of Bach's Jesus bleibet meine Freude call to mind The End of Evangelion's audience scene where we see the world continuing, and the world without the body to occupy it. It is a pre-post-present apocalypse.
Emporium only cemented this in/after the end reasoning to me. The overwhelming bass as the world collapses around the self, every fragment of life gone apart from the knights. This is a realm of post-apocalyptic techno-serfdom as conveyed in James Ferraro's Four Pieces for Mirai. It is a land of desiccated theology, of fire's warmth, of murderous necessity. When the meaning of tarot is lost, we look to those omnipresent Bicycle brand playing cards for some answer from the cosmos, given to us like manna by a video poker machine. This is the Strugatsky Brother's notion of a Roadside Picnic, these fragments of someone's dicarded past misunderstood and misapplied to eke out some sort of undeserved existence. Were that not enough, this space is explicitly Hamilton, Ontario. This is not an MMO space, this is a real space. When we get on the boat to leave, we are not headed for brighter shores for there are none. We continue a spiral of non-life and non-death until, mercifully, it will end.
The combat of Technopolis was a non-act, your targets unflinching though they oozed digital red. Emporium had combat as a means to an end for progression, your spear poking into flaming bodies with no retaliation. Autogeny by contrast insists on an actual combat system, at odds with the previous Pagan titles' recontextualisation of violence. It exists only to further the notion of this being an MMO locale. The inventory becomes a clusterfuck of labour vouchers and multiple copies of limbs as items reappear out of necessity when changing locations. The difficult navigation of a blurred, fogged landscape makes everything a frustration exacerbated by agonisingly slow movement. It wastes time by having death as a possibility, by having its multiple endings locked behind repeat full playthroughs a requirement.
Much of this is no doubt due to my own misunderstanding of what the Pagan titles were trying to convey to me. Autogeny makes it explicit that the space the player delves into and reclaims are part of a dead MMO, something that never occured to me with the previous titles. Autogeny is undeniably about the trans (re)claiming of digital spaces. One of your skills is Estrogen, a character tells you that walls are little more than clandestine passages, Body Forging is levelled by appending thigh-high socks to a busty mannequin. I find those aspects fascinating, and fitting for a dead MMO. Not that I can speak with any authourity, but I think like with STG (keep in mind the top Battle Garegga player in the world is a trans woman), the appeal of trans/queer inquiries into the dead MMO space have to do with an a-communal appeal. For an MMO, here exists a land ostensibly populated with other people, real in the case of a 'living' MMO, a simulacra for a dead MMO. Those fictionalised representations of people don't harbour the same discriminatory sentiments that real players might. These false selves hate goblins and demons, not a real person's actual existence. One won't be called a slur for any number of reasons, these players become as ghosts in the machine, consuming that which is no longer considered suitable for consumption. And all of this is fantastic and deserves to be realised in a cohesive, singular gamespace that is agnostic of actual MMOs, I just don't think Autogeny operates well as that space.
The appeal of Technopolis and Emporium largely arose from the non-labelling of them as dead MMOs. The thought hadn't even occurred to me. The colour-banding grey miasma of Technopolis didn't strike me as a dead digital space, but as a non-place between life and death. The pervasiveness of John Atkinson Grimshaw's nocturnal urban purgatories and John William Waterhouse's The Magic Circle and Hylas with a Nymph made it plain to me that this was a time before death, a time of abduction, a time of awaiting a true end. The skills of Technopolis suggested responses to catastrophe, the grey concrete nothings mining away at cars a sort of coping through this transitory period. When rapture is on its way (or perhaps occurrent) would we not descend into a mad reverie of our silicon masters, or stoke the flames of seared flesh in the name of an urban scavenger? The accompanying player piano's ceaseless echoes of Bach's Jesus bleibet meine Freude call to mind The End of Evangelion's audience scene where we see the world continuing, and the world without the body to occupy it. It is a pre-post-present apocalypse.
Emporium only cemented this in/after the end reasoning to me. The overwhelming bass as the world collapses around the self, every fragment of life gone apart from the knights. This is a realm of post-apocalyptic techno-serfdom as conveyed in James Ferraro's Four Pieces for Mirai. It is a land of desiccated theology, of fire's warmth, of murderous necessity. When the meaning of tarot is lost, we look to those omnipresent Bicycle brand playing cards for some answer from the cosmos, given to us like manna by a video poker machine. This is the Strugatsky Brother's notion of a Roadside Picnic, these fragments of someone's dicarded past misunderstood and misapplied to eke out some sort of undeserved existence. Were that not enough, this space is explicitly Hamilton, Ontario. This is not an MMO space, this is a real space. When we get on the boat to leave, we are not headed for brighter shores for there are none. We continue a spiral of non-life and non-death until, mercifully, it will end.
The combat of Technopolis was a non-act, your targets unflinching though they oozed digital red. Emporium had combat as a means to an end for progression, your spear poking into flaming bodies with no retaliation. Autogeny by contrast insists on an actual combat system, at odds with the previous Pagan titles' recontextualisation of violence. It exists only to further the notion of this being an MMO locale. The inventory becomes a clusterfuck of labour vouchers and multiple copies of limbs as items reappear out of necessity when changing locations. The difficult navigation of a blurred, fogged landscape makes everything a frustration exacerbated by agonisingly slow movement. It wastes time by having death as a possibility, by having its multiple endings locked behind repeat full playthroughs a requirement.
1997
Making the intricacies of fine art history enjoyable is an unenviable task that CD-ROM interactive experiences fervently tried to surmount throughout the 1990s. Whereas Mystery of the Orangery and Mission Sunlight opted for narrative adventures that happened to teach art history through immersive paintings as setpieces, Night Cafe takes a drier, safer approach. Wandering the streets of Montmarte with nary a pedestrian in sight. Overcast lighting doing Haussmann's Paris a disservice. Setting off to some select locales, able to wander just enough to question why the option exists when one is intended to beeline to the puzzle objectives.
The narration is smooth and deep, but fails to impart knowledge on the why of the Impressionists, opting instead for discussion of relations and painterly methodology. While this is fine for those already familiar with the subject matter, it assuredly would leave the casually interested in the dark as to what the point of it all was. Yes, the Impressionists sought an interplay of light and colour and open compositions, yes they painted en plein aire, yes they were rejected from the Salon de Paris, but why does that matter? Académie des Beaux-Arts is mentioned in passing, but little is said of the wilful rejection of contemporary standards.
Of interest must be the methodology herein. Outside those typically solitary narrations, much of the text exists as excerpts from correspondence. This holds true in the 'adventure' part of the game, and in the unlocked galleries of each artist's works. If a painting does have an accompanying document (in both French and English), it establishes some slight context, but leaves the work itself unexplained and unexplored. Perhaps a scholastic explanation of each work would be excessive. But as it stands, one is left wondering why these specific paintings matter. We are told Manet's Olympia was controversial and important, but not how or why. With the dictionary/encyclopedia ever at the ready within the program, it seems a misstep -- the primary sources could be front and centre, with greater detail and sources in that secondary space.
The loose gameplay of Night Cafe disappoints as well. Sometimes one wanders through each and every pre-rendered scene in a space, collecting objects or figures. These are then placed blindly onto a painted surface to reconstruct a relevant work, or are arranged into sequence despite the player having no means of knowing the solution. By way of example, in Theo van Gogh's apartment, sepia prints of Vincent's works are gathered, then put into frames labelled with years and locations. Two of these can be solved by comparing the tiny image to sketches on letters nearby. The rest cannot. Except there is no consequence for mismatching frame and picture, so just drag them one by one onto each frame to see what sticks. Absolutely nothing is learned here. The same holds true for when placing figures into a scene. One has no clue who these figures are, nor where they are situated, nor why this even matters. The figures aren't even named. The other puzzles invariably require moving sliders to change 3x3 tiles of paintings, only the sliders affect two tiles rather than just the one selected. It isn't challenging, only frustrating.
Despite doing nothing particularly well, Night Cafe nonetheless is a cute enough experience for the weary art history student. It is a short romp where I could smile in recognition of critical artworks, and raise an eyebrow at the inclusion of Post-Impressionists. Outside of that, there is little (if not nothing) to be learned here and not a shred of fun drawn from the adventure and its challenges. It is a testament to misplaced zeal in the heyday of multimedia, a presupposing that anything is implicitly interesting by virtue of being on a poly-carbonate optical disc.
The narration is smooth and deep, but fails to impart knowledge on the why of the Impressionists, opting instead for discussion of relations and painterly methodology. While this is fine for those already familiar with the subject matter, it assuredly would leave the casually interested in the dark as to what the point of it all was. Yes, the Impressionists sought an interplay of light and colour and open compositions, yes they painted en plein aire, yes they were rejected from the Salon de Paris, but why does that matter? Académie des Beaux-Arts is mentioned in passing, but little is said of the wilful rejection of contemporary standards.
Of interest must be the methodology herein. Outside those typically solitary narrations, much of the text exists as excerpts from correspondence. This holds true in the 'adventure' part of the game, and in the unlocked galleries of each artist's works. If a painting does have an accompanying document (in both French and English), it establishes some slight context, but leaves the work itself unexplained and unexplored. Perhaps a scholastic explanation of each work would be excessive. But as it stands, one is left wondering why these specific paintings matter. We are told Manet's Olympia was controversial and important, but not how or why. With the dictionary/encyclopedia ever at the ready within the program, it seems a misstep -- the primary sources could be front and centre, with greater detail and sources in that secondary space.
The loose gameplay of Night Cafe disappoints as well. Sometimes one wanders through each and every pre-rendered scene in a space, collecting objects or figures. These are then placed blindly onto a painted surface to reconstruct a relevant work, or are arranged into sequence despite the player having no means of knowing the solution. By way of example, in Theo van Gogh's apartment, sepia prints of Vincent's works are gathered, then put into frames labelled with years and locations. Two of these can be solved by comparing the tiny image to sketches on letters nearby. The rest cannot. Except there is no consequence for mismatching frame and picture, so just drag them one by one onto each frame to see what sticks. Absolutely nothing is learned here. The same holds true for when placing figures into a scene. One has no clue who these figures are, nor where they are situated, nor why this even matters. The figures aren't even named. The other puzzles invariably require moving sliders to change 3x3 tiles of paintings, only the sliders affect two tiles rather than just the one selected. It isn't challenging, only frustrating.
Despite doing nothing particularly well, Night Cafe nonetheless is a cute enough experience for the weary art history student. It is a short romp where I could smile in recognition of critical artworks, and raise an eyebrow at the inclusion of Post-Impressionists. Outside of that, there is little (if not nothing) to be learned here and not a shred of fun drawn from the adventure and its challenges. It is a testament to misplaced zeal in the heyday of multimedia, a presupposing that anything is implicitly interesting by virtue of being on a poly-carbonate optical disc.
2022
Another exceptionally well realised home run from Narayan Walters.
From the moment you cauterise your wounds, Endoparasitic makes it apparent how much one can do with less. The remaining arm is as much a resource as time and your bullets. It is your sole means of movement, of fighting, of managing your inventory, of interacting, of healing. The careful player will ensure their weapons are loaded before an encounter so as to not fumble around with reloading in a fight. Yet fumble you will as you juggle your guns for maximum efficiency. And one cannot even be too cautious due to the ticking clock element of the parasite in your system. Just as in Wrought Flesh, battles have a wondrous balancing act of risk and reward, where clearing an encounter more quickly offsets gradual degradation, but it can lead to an exacerbation of disadvantages. When shit hits the fan, you are stuck with the decision of crawling away or standing your ground, and never feel like quite the perfect option.
And I love that nothing feels like the best choice! In stealth segments on the brink of death you wonder if you should make a break for it, or pray you have enough time, or simply shoot those watchful sentries. Is it better to leave cocoons untouched along with their spoils, or should you crack them up for loot and risk enemies spawning who might start a domino effect? When the hunter arrives, will you run? Shoot? Use it as a weapon? Which ammo will you keep on you for the trials ahead? Do you really want to potentially endanger yourself by using your crossbow with its cranking reload?
It all synthesises beautifully, and once you get a hand on the mechanics your triple amputation hardly feels like a burden. Being controlled entirely with one hand on the mouse makes everything feel so natural, the digital body becomes an extension of the self. Maybe you were the parasite all along 👻
From the moment you cauterise your wounds, Endoparasitic makes it apparent how much one can do with less. The remaining arm is as much a resource as time and your bullets. It is your sole means of movement, of fighting, of managing your inventory, of interacting, of healing. The careful player will ensure their weapons are loaded before an encounter so as to not fumble around with reloading in a fight. Yet fumble you will as you juggle your guns for maximum efficiency. And one cannot even be too cautious due to the ticking clock element of the parasite in your system. Just as in Wrought Flesh, battles have a wondrous balancing act of risk and reward, where clearing an encounter more quickly offsets gradual degradation, but it can lead to an exacerbation of disadvantages. When shit hits the fan, you are stuck with the decision of crawling away or standing your ground, and never feel like quite the perfect option.
And I love that nothing feels like the best choice! In stealth segments on the brink of death you wonder if you should make a break for it, or pray you have enough time, or simply shoot those watchful sentries. Is it better to leave cocoons untouched along with their spoils, or should you crack them up for loot and risk enemies spawning who might start a domino effect? When the hunter arrives, will you run? Shoot? Use it as a weapon? Which ammo will you keep on you for the trials ahead? Do you really want to potentially endanger yourself by using your crossbow with its cranking reload?
It all synthesises beautifully, and once you get a hand on the mechanics your triple amputation hardly feels like a burden. Being controlled entirely with one hand on the mouse makes everything feel so natural, the digital body becomes an extension of the self. Maybe you were the parasite all along 👻
A perfect tasting menu of Sonic.
Genuinely stunning considering that, on paper, none of Sonic Pocket Adventure's quirks should be conducive to a good Sonic experience. Being made in conjunction with SNK to be purpose-built for the Neo Geo Pocket, there's a greater understanding of the hardware on display here than in the Game Gear titles or the Sonic Advance series. There, speed becomes a burden. Here, speed comes naturally just as in the mainline titles. There, the screen is cramped. Here, despite the square display, you don't feel the need to cautiously inch forward out of fear for what lies ahead. Not once across my two playthroughs did I feel like I got hit because of something outside my control.
Stages are all derivative of previous titles (primarily Sonic 2) but they've been scaled down or reworked to accommodate the handheld experience. Despite this, levels still contain alternate paths and an incentive to explore (especially if you're going for puzzle pieces). Not only are levels themselves transplanted, so too is the vast majority of the soundtrack. Rather than take, say, Casino Night Zone's music from Sonic 2 for Pocket Adventure's Cosmic Casino Zone, the tracks are taken from Sonic 3 & Knuckles'Doilus Bonus Stages. Those tracks are then de-made for the Neo Geo Pocket's sound capabilities. In effect, the soundtrack is an official remix of Sonic 3 & Knuckles by SNK's Maitaro.
Nothing on offer here overstays its welcome with shorter levels that work for quick sessions, and a stage select that means putting the game away won't hamper progress. Unlike other 2D Sonic titles, here I actually wanted to do the Time Trials to see how fast I could tear through the stages. Clocking in at about an hour and a half per full playthrough, you get a delightful morsel of your typical Sonic zones without ever thinking how desperately you want out ofChemical Secret Plant. There's even a little Sky Chase! You get to fight Knuckles and Mecha Sonic! Eggman is seen in his classic and Adventure outfits! Hot damn!!!
Genuinely stunning considering that, on paper, none of Sonic Pocket Adventure's quirks should be conducive to a good Sonic experience. Being made in conjunction with SNK to be purpose-built for the Neo Geo Pocket, there's a greater understanding of the hardware on display here than in the Game Gear titles or the Sonic Advance series. There, speed becomes a burden. Here, speed comes naturally just as in the mainline titles. There, the screen is cramped. Here, despite the square display, you don't feel the need to cautiously inch forward out of fear for what lies ahead. Not once across my two playthroughs did I feel like I got hit because of something outside my control.
Stages are all derivative of previous titles (primarily Sonic 2) but they've been scaled down or reworked to accommodate the handheld experience. Despite this, levels still contain alternate paths and an incentive to explore (especially if you're going for puzzle pieces). Not only are levels themselves transplanted, so too is the vast majority of the soundtrack. Rather than take, say, Casino Night Zone's music from Sonic 2 for Pocket Adventure's Cosmic Casino Zone, the tracks are taken from Sonic 3 & Knuckles'
Nothing on offer here overstays its welcome with shorter levels that work for quick sessions, and a stage select that means putting the game away won't hamper progress. Unlike other 2D Sonic titles, here I actually wanted to do the Time Trials to see how fast I could tear through the stages. Clocking in at about an hour and a half per full playthrough, you get a delightful morsel of your typical Sonic zones without ever thinking how desperately you want out of