Killjoy_Kora
767 Reviews liked by Killjoy_Kora
Paratopic
2018
This review contains spoilers
Paratopic is an indie horror walking simulator game developed by Arbitrary Metric (specifically a man named Doc Buford along with devs Chris Brown and Jessica Harvey) on the Unity Engine and released in 2018. I can’t seem to find too much about Doc, though from what I understand he’s a bit of a freelancer who works on other games (like previously reviewed Adios and Hardspace: Shipbreaker) as well as his own titles (Roman Sands: RE-Build) and writes essays about video games on the side (source links below). The only other piece of trivia I could find was from TVTropes, that this was supposed to be the prologue of a five part series though I'm unsure, that and the dev wanted to create a walking sim where the story happens to you and isn't relayed to you. As for me, I had originally learned of this game through a Youtube Essayist named RagnaRox, who did a video on the monsters of the game and from then on the graphics mixed in with the surrealist storytelling lit a fire under my ass to give the game a try at some point which I ended up doing in 2021. I think I played it about three times, with the latter two playthroughs for other people and as such that’s how this review came about; playing through this game, You Will (Not) Remain and NIGHTSLINK as a triple feature after my playthrough of Carrier on Dreamcast got mucked up by controller button mess up.
Just like with You Will (Not) Remain, the plot and gameplay will be combined as the gameplay is rather brief. It’s basically sort of a travel sim with limited interactivity; you’ll walk to (or drive to) certain places and depending on the point of view you’re playing from you’ll maybe shoot a gun or take pictures with a camera (along with interacting with the car radio). Other than that you’ll interact with the environment by clicking on certain items and engage in multiple option dialogue but that’s basically it. It’s meant to be played in one sitting.
The story is seemingly told out of order but involves three characters: an assassin, a smuggler and a bird watcher. The Smuggler seems to be working for a secret organization (with the same symbol) and is at first under interrogation by a guard of sorts for having undeclared VHS tapes. This of course leads to them watching the tapes and bright lights shine out of the room. From there we get segments like going back to your apartment to hear that strange men broke into it, with your next door neighbor fiending for these VHS tapes like a junkie would. Giving her a tape results in her head growing flower petals. There are serene cuts of the smuggler driving down the highway with VHS tapes and a revolver (same person?) along with cuts to a gas station where this smuggler makes small talk with the cashier. However, an ominous presence seems to lurk nearby, a strange black creature who appears in the shadows every now and then.
The assassin is instructed to retrieve some contraband for her employers and her segment ends when she shoots a man in the back of a diner standing next to a strange symbol who has a set of VHS tapes. Every time she puts one in it just rewinds to when she shoots the man previously.
The Birdwatcher probably has the most mysterious lore segments in the game, with the birdwatcher picking up her camera and walking into the woods to take pictures of nature. Walking to a nearby shed and opening the doors reveal a secret lab down below, and when the power is turned on there’s a representative from “The Power Company” who thanks his people for their sacrifices. What this lab is and what it has to do with the story is unknown.
Eventually the story coalesces into the finale: The Birdwatcher ends up going through an area filled with destroyed shipping containers and strange security cameras who seem to watch her. Below a radio tower she sees the strange black creature from before, and any attempts to film it leads to static on her camera. It disappears for a bit before she gets brutally murdered. It goes back to the smuggler being interrogated by the guard in the beginning before the guard dissolves into a giant TV which has “SEE YOU FRIENDO” labeled across and the assassin heads to the radio tower in the woods to see the Bird Watcher’s corpse impaled and skinned. Calling the police to reveal the location of the body and collecting the camera, when the police ask for her name the call hangs up. Credits.
The lore of this world impressed me. Who is this power company and what do the labs have to do with the creature? How about the VHS tapes, what is the connection? Why is there a smuggling business and what does it provide? What does the assassin have to do with this? Are the smuggler and the assassin the same person? These are all questions that go through my mind as the game makes you interact with the serenity of driving down long highways, reloading a gun bullet by bullet or taking pictures of birds. I liked this plot, how they don’t really give you the answers as much as they make you piece the puzzle together (and fill in the blanks) on your own. There are a lot of theories out there, and so I’ll post some links below to get some info on what might have happened but generally I like the plot. However, if this was part of a series of games then I could tell due to the nature of the game, and honestly I wish the dev continued the series.
Graphically the game uses the chunky low polygon PS1 graphics that I love so much, and so for that I don’t have much to say. However, I like how the graphics enhance the warped nature of the world itself. It looks sometimes like other people’s heads shift and expand sometimes, their faces crudely stapled with a flat expression as the limited frames make it feel unreal. The color schemes mostly consist of browns and darker colors with the exceptions of lights and the bright forest, the only supposed place for safety that have arrow-tipped resembling trees. The lighting during the driving segments though feel relaxed and calm, peaceful as you drive down a never-ending highway filled with the same shaped buildings. Everything looks pretty damn good, and the graphical style only helps the horror come to life with the limited visuals, a reason that probably a lot of indie game devs use PS1 style graphics (nostalgia and budget aside of course).
The sound design for this game consists of a few different things: a lot of dialogue that sounds halfway between real dialogue and gibberish, almost as if it’s backmasked; ominous droning mixed in with synth and certain sound effects like footstep pattering (an ASMR favorite of mine) and birds chirping. I feel like all of these sounds help present the world as a mostly hostile place, a place where everyone and everything is unknown only enhanced with the art design. Mixed in with the Bird Watching segments, the only place you’ll get some peace (besides the driving segments which have these gibberish sounding talk show segments that sound so real yet so alien) only add to the hostility once the Bird Watcher ends up dead. After all, if not even nature is safe then what is safe? Also that windmill creek is creepy as hell. Not much to say other than that, it’s solid even if it’s not the most noticeable part for me.
Paratopic is one of those games that seems to have become a bit of a mixed bag for a lot of people on the Steam reviews. A lot of criticisms were based on the length, the lack of gameplay and the abrupt ending apparently but I actually enjoyed all of these features despite it. It tells a three person point of view narrative into a strange world obsessed with old VHS tapes that honestly made me fiend for more. What are these tapes? Why do they do what they do? They left me wanting more, attempting to pierce together the plot or maybe make me wonder if it’s all an allegory for something. The developer delivered an interesting short-form game in a time where I feel that these sorts of games weren’t really popular (I could be wrong) so I feel that this mixed in with the old chunky graphics honestly makes it stand out to me. The game sells for 5.49 on Steam at a normal price, and the actual gameplay takes between 30 minutes to an hour or so depending on if you’re exploring it or not. Whether or not the game’s price is worth it with the hours played is up to you, however I ended up getting the game from my homie SuperGodPunch around my birthday in 2020 so I didn’t have to spend any money. You big pimping for that my guy.
Links:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1508153436
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/Paratopic
https://steamcommunity.com/app/897030/discussions/0/1742220359699118699/
https://www.patreon.com/docgames/about?
https://docseuss.medium.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzSbExQ11QU&ab_channel=RagnarRox
https://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/joq9lv/what_is_going_on_in_paratopic_plot_discussion/
From Steam Reviews: https://steamcommunity.com/id/gamemast15r/recommended/
Just like with You Will (Not) Remain, the plot and gameplay will be combined as the gameplay is rather brief. It’s basically sort of a travel sim with limited interactivity; you’ll walk to (or drive to) certain places and depending on the point of view you’re playing from you’ll maybe shoot a gun or take pictures with a camera (along with interacting with the car radio). Other than that you’ll interact with the environment by clicking on certain items and engage in multiple option dialogue but that’s basically it. It’s meant to be played in one sitting.
The story is seemingly told out of order but involves three characters: an assassin, a smuggler and a bird watcher. The Smuggler seems to be working for a secret organization (with the same symbol) and is at first under interrogation by a guard of sorts for having undeclared VHS tapes. This of course leads to them watching the tapes and bright lights shine out of the room. From there we get segments like going back to your apartment to hear that strange men broke into it, with your next door neighbor fiending for these VHS tapes like a junkie would. Giving her a tape results in her head growing flower petals. There are serene cuts of the smuggler driving down the highway with VHS tapes and a revolver (same person?) along with cuts to a gas station where this smuggler makes small talk with the cashier. However, an ominous presence seems to lurk nearby, a strange black creature who appears in the shadows every now and then.
The assassin is instructed to retrieve some contraband for her employers and her segment ends when she shoots a man in the back of a diner standing next to a strange symbol who has a set of VHS tapes. Every time she puts one in it just rewinds to when she shoots the man previously.
The Birdwatcher probably has the most mysterious lore segments in the game, with the birdwatcher picking up her camera and walking into the woods to take pictures of nature. Walking to a nearby shed and opening the doors reveal a secret lab down below, and when the power is turned on there’s a representative from “The Power Company” who thanks his people for their sacrifices. What this lab is and what it has to do with the story is unknown.
Eventually the story coalesces into the finale: The Birdwatcher ends up going through an area filled with destroyed shipping containers and strange security cameras who seem to watch her. Below a radio tower she sees the strange black creature from before, and any attempts to film it leads to static on her camera. It disappears for a bit before she gets brutally murdered. It goes back to the smuggler being interrogated by the guard in the beginning before the guard dissolves into a giant TV which has “SEE YOU FRIENDO” labeled across and the assassin heads to the radio tower in the woods to see the Bird Watcher’s corpse impaled and skinned. Calling the police to reveal the location of the body and collecting the camera, when the police ask for her name the call hangs up. Credits.
The lore of this world impressed me. Who is this power company and what do the labs have to do with the creature? How about the VHS tapes, what is the connection? Why is there a smuggling business and what does it provide? What does the assassin have to do with this? Are the smuggler and the assassin the same person? These are all questions that go through my mind as the game makes you interact with the serenity of driving down long highways, reloading a gun bullet by bullet or taking pictures of birds. I liked this plot, how they don’t really give you the answers as much as they make you piece the puzzle together (and fill in the blanks) on your own. There are a lot of theories out there, and so I’ll post some links below to get some info on what might have happened but generally I like the plot. However, if this was part of a series of games then I could tell due to the nature of the game, and honestly I wish the dev continued the series.
Graphically the game uses the chunky low polygon PS1 graphics that I love so much, and so for that I don’t have much to say. However, I like how the graphics enhance the warped nature of the world itself. It looks sometimes like other people’s heads shift and expand sometimes, their faces crudely stapled with a flat expression as the limited frames make it feel unreal. The color schemes mostly consist of browns and darker colors with the exceptions of lights and the bright forest, the only supposed place for safety that have arrow-tipped resembling trees. The lighting during the driving segments though feel relaxed and calm, peaceful as you drive down a never-ending highway filled with the same shaped buildings. Everything looks pretty damn good, and the graphical style only helps the horror come to life with the limited visuals, a reason that probably a lot of indie game devs use PS1 style graphics (nostalgia and budget aside of course).
The sound design for this game consists of a few different things: a lot of dialogue that sounds halfway between real dialogue and gibberish, almost as if it’s backmasked; ominous droning mixed in with synth and certain sound effects like footstep pattering (an ASMR favorite of mine) and birds chirping. I feel like all of these sounds help present the world as a mostly hostile place, a place where everyone and everything is unknown only enhanced with the art design. Mixed in with the Bird Watching segments, the only place you’ll get some peace (besides the driving segments which have these gibberish sounding talk show segments that sound so real yet so alien) only add to the hostility once the Bird Watcher ends up dead. After all, if not even nature is safe then what is safe? Also that windmill creek is creepy as hell. Not much to say other than that, it’s solid even if it’s not the most noticeable part for me.
Paratopic is one of those games that seems to have become a bit of a mixed bag for a lot of people on the Steam reviews. A lot of criticisms were based on the length, the lack of gameplay and the abrupt ending apparently but I actually enjoyed all of these features despite it. It tells a three person point of view narrative into a strange world obsessed with old VHS tapes that honestly made me fiend for more. What are these tapes? Why do they do what they do? They left me wanting more, attempting to pierce together the plot or maybe make me wonder if it’s all an allegory for something. The developer delivered an interesting short-form game in a time where I feel that these sorts of games weren’t really popular (I could be wrong) so I feel that this mixed in with the old chunky graphics honestly makes it stand out to me. The game sells for 5.49 on Steam at a normal price, and the actual gameplay takes between 30 minutes to an hour or so depending on if you’re exploring it or not. Whether or not the game’s price is worth it with the hours played is up to you, however I ended up getting the game from my homie SuperGodPunch around my birthday in 2020 so I didn’t have to spend any money. You big pimping for that my guy.
Links:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1508153436
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/Paratopic
https://steamcommunity.com/app/897030/discussions/0/1742220359699118699/
https://www.patreon.com/docgames/about?
https://docseuss.medium.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzSbExQ11QU&ab_channel=RagnarRox
https://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/joq9lv/what_is_going_on_in_paratopic_plot_discussion/
From Steam Reviews: https://steamcommunity.com/id/gamemast15r/recommended/
I think what makes Nier: Automata stand out is that it lacks the pomp and circumstance of other JRPGs. For the most part, it is a sad, quiet game. At first I resented the fact that the game serves up its numerous plot twists with little fanfare, but towards the end I grew to appreciate how the game handled itself in a manner different from most other JRPGs, not shoving the power of friendship down your throat, even when times are dire and you’re expecting it. Nier: Automata isn’t a game that will make you bawl your eyes out, but it is great at making you, the player, uncomfortable. There is a strong sense of disquiet that permeates every one of the game’s major scenes, when the drama dissipates and you’re left staring at an upsetting image that the game intentionally chooses to spend an awkward amount of time on. These sorts of moments are especially frequent and potent in the game’s third act. This is easily Nier: Automata’s strongest quality, and if that sounds like your kind of thing, I would wholeheartedly recommend giving it a try.
The other thing I really liked about Nier: Automata was its cast, specifically 2B and 9S. Even though it didn’t feel like they had a ton of dialogue together, the dialogue they did have really sold me on their dynamic. You can tell they really care for each other, and I wish the two had a few more conversations together to fully hammer that in. That’s the one JRPG trope I did miss from Nier: Automata, characters sitting down and hashing out their feelings together.
That all being said, there were a couple of areas where I felt the game sort of missed the mark. For one, the combat is… kinda bad? For a game that is supposedly an action RPG, it fails at doing either of those things particularly well. For an action game, most of your close-range attacks come out pretty slowly, and as a result feel weirdly heavy, running counter to the idea of a fast-paced action game where you slice and dice your way through enemies. This could’ve worked if the game leaned more into its RPG elements, but if Nier: Automata is barely an action game, it’s even less of an RPG, because there is almost no strategy involved in the combat beyond timing your dodges well. First and foremost, the customization of your combat loadout is extremely limited. Throughout the whole game, you have two close-range attacks (with one exception, but we’ll get to that) and one ranged attack, and that’s it. In theory there are different weapon choices that can change the nature of those close-ranged attacks, but the game never really compelled me to switch up my weapon loadout, so in practice this didn’t matter. Even if the game did provide you with a compelling reason to change your weapon often though, it still wouldn’t matter because of the way your ranged attack works. The default ranged attack deals a steady stream of chip damage to any enemy within a pretty generous radius, so hypothetically you can win pretty much any combat encounter by standing back, holding down the ranged attack button, and dodging when necessary. Obviously this isn’t particularly fun, and is not the recommended way to play the game, but I think the fact that it’s a valid strategy for almost every fight in the game sufficiently illustrates my point.
The other option that the game will sometimes give you for combat in place of one of your close-range attacks is the ability to hack into enemies (because they’re all robots of some variety) initiating a shooter minigame that deals a large amount of damage to the enemy if you win. Nier: Automata actually uses this minigame to great effect at certain points in the narrative for storytelling, but it really breaks up the flow of combat, and thus only feels satisfying as a combat tool in some of the longer boss fights. Now, I will say that despite everything I’ve just said, the combat isn’t unbearable—it’s fun in short bursts—but it gets really monotonous when encounters are strung together.
My other major gripe with the game is the way it handles its first two acts. They’re basically the same, except that the second act has flashbacks that flesh out the antagonists, making them (and, by extension 9S, who interestingly seems to hate the machines the most despite knowing the most about their plight out of any of the main cast) infinitely more compelling. I get what they were going for, you want to leave some questions unanswered to build suspense, but it had the unintended consequence of retrospectively making the first act feel way weaker than the rest of the game from a narrative perspective, especially when taking the narrative excellence of the third act into consideration.
Also, as a final note, if I can just dump my biggest Nier: Automata hot take right here at the end, the soundtrack was way overhyped. Yes, it’s super cool that they created a conlang just for the game’s soundtrack, but like, the songs still have to be musically compelling, regardless of the language. I just didn’t find many of the melodies to be particularly memorable.
The other thing I really liked about Nier: Automata was its cast, specifically 2B and 9S. Even though it didn’t feel like they had a ton of dialogue together, the dialogue they did have really sold me on their dynamic. You can tell they really care for each other, and I wish the two had a few more conversations together to fully hammer that in. That’s the one JRPG trope I did miss from Nier: Automata, characters sitting down and hashing out their feelings together.
That all being said, there were a couple of areas where I felt the game sort of missed the mark. For one, the combat is… kinda bad? For a game that is supposedly an action RPG, it fails at doing either of those things particularly well. For an action game, most of your close-range attacks come out pretty slowly, and as a result feel weirdly heavy, running counter to the idea of a fast-paced action game where you slice and dice your way through enemies. This could’ve worked if the game leaned more into its RPG elements, but if Nier: Automata is barely an action game, it’s even less of an RPG, because there is almost no strategy involved in the combat beyond timing your dodges well. First and foremost, the customization of your combat loadout is extremely limited. Throughout the whole game, you have two close-range attacks (with one exception, but we’ll get to that) and one ranged attack, and that’s it. In theory there are different weapon choices that can change the nature of those close-ranged attacks, but the game never really compelled me to switch up my weapon loadout, so in practice this didn’t matter. Even if the game did provide you with a compelling reason to change your weapon often though, it still wouldn’t matter because of the way your ranged attack works. The default ranged attack deals a steady stream of chip damage to any enemy within a pretty generous radius, so hypothetically you can win pretty much any combat encounter by standing back, holding down the ranged attack button, and dodging when necessary. Obviously this isn’t particularly fun, and is not the recommended way to play the game, but I think the fact that it’s a valid strategy for almost every fight in the game sufficiently illustrates my point.
The other option that the game will sometimes give you for combat in place of one of your close-range attacks is the ability to hack into enemies (because they’re all robots of some variety) initiating a shooter minigame that deals a large amount of damage to the enemy if you win. Nier: Automata actually uses this minigame to great effect at certain points in the narrative for storytelling, but it really breaks up the flow of combat, and thus only feels satisfying as a combat tool in some of the longer boss fights. Now, I will say that despite everything I’ve just said, the combat isn’t unbearable—it’s fun in short bursts—but it gets really monotonous when encounters are strung together.
My other major gripe with the game is the way it handles its first two acts. They’re basically the same, except that the second act has flashbacks that flesh out the antagonists, making them (and, by extension 9S, who interestingly seems to hate the machines the most despite knowing the most about their plight out of any of the main cast) infinitely more compelling. I get what they were going for, you want to leave some questions unanswered to build suspense, but it had the unintended consequence of retrospectively making the first act feel way weaker than the rest of the game from a narrative perspective, especially when taking the narrative excellence of the third act into consideration.
Also, as a final note, if I can just dump my biggest Nier: Automata hot take right here at the end, the soundtrack was way overhyped. Yes, it’s super cool that they created a conlang just for the game’s soundtrack, but like, the songs still have to be musically compelling, regardless of the language. I just didn’t find many of the melodies to be particularly memorable.
"The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever." - Jacques Yves Cousteau
It is estimated that we as a species have only explored about 5% of the world's oceans. On the other hand, I estimate that the average Backloggd user hasn't even cleared that much of their backlog. Hell, mapping the entire ocean floor probably sounds like a more probable inevitability than ever getting through your backlog. Well, what's one more gonna hurt?Though, I would like it if you actually played it.
Endless Ocean 2 (known as Blue World in North America) is a game that probably flew under most peoples' radar even on release. With about 870,000 lifetime sales globally for this title specifically, it's safe to say that the series is pretty niche. I'm surprised that we even got a third game recently, despite apparently not being all that great. But that's another review for another time. EO2 molded a strong core memory within me that fits neatly amongst only a handful of other vivid and emotionally meaningful gaming experiences I experienced in my youth. Mind you, I was always fascinated with marine biology and oceanography. There's something truly fascinating but also chilling about the deep ocean. So many areas that have yet to be explored and species that are yet to be discovered. This game feeds on that childlike curiosity and excels at immersing you in the beauty of nature's waters.
Yes, there is a story, and it's actually a lot more involved than you would expect for a game who's main selling point is its exploration-driven gameplay and educational merit. It takes a page out of Tomb Raider and Uncharted, placing you in the shoes of a college student studying folklore who becomes entranced in a certain Pacific legend, travelling to the South Pacific to investigate further. You take a job at a local diving company, and adventure ensues. Throughout the campaign, you will be tasked with exploring various locales that include shallow coral reefs, muddy rivers, arctic waters, and the deep ocean, at times even exploring abandoned ancient ruins. It's semi-open world nature gives it a sense of scale that has yet to be matched in terms of immersion. Maybe Subnautica? But that game is nowhere near as good, methinks.
Between uncovering and appraising lost treasures, discovering new species to add to the marine encyclopedia, and mapping uncharted waters, it feels like there's so much to do. I actually wouldn't be surprised if this was the only single-player game I've played where I've surpassed the 100-hour playtime mark. As someone who rarely replays games, I never really considered having a comfort game, but sitting here writing this review has made me re-evaluate that. In fact, I have the sudden urge to replay this.
It is estimated that we as a species have only explored about 5% of the world's oceans. On the other hand, I estimate that the average Backloggd user hasn't even cleared that much of their backlog. Hell, mapping the entire ocean floor probably sounds like a more probable inevitability than ever getting through your backlog. Well, what's one more gonna hurt?
Endless Ocean 2 (known as Blue World in North America) is a game that probably flew under most peoples' radar even on release. With about 870,000 lifetime sales globally for this title specifically, it's safe to say that the series is pretty niche. I'm surprised that we even got a third game recently, despite apparently not being all that great. But that's another review for another time. EO2 molded a strong core memory within me that fits neatly amongst only a handful of other vivid and emotionally meaningful gaming experiences I experienced in my youth. Mind you, I was always fascinated with marine biology and oceanography. There's something truly fascinating but also chilling about the deep ocean. So many areas that have yet to be explored and species that are yet to be discovered. This game feeds on that childlike curiosity and excels at immersing you in the beauty of nature's waters.
Yes, there is a story, and it's actually a lot more involved than you would expect for a game who's main selling point is its exploration-driven gameplay and educational merit. It takes a page out of Tomb Raider and Uncharted, placing you in the shoes of a college student studying folklore who becomes entranced in a certain Pacific legend, travelling to the South Pacific to investigate further. You take a job at a local diving company, and adventure ensues. Throughout the campaign, you will be tasked with exploring various locales that include shallow coral reefs, muddy rivers, arctic waters, and the deep ocean, at times even exploring abandoned ancient ruins. It's semi-open world nature gives it a sense of scale that has yet to be matched in terms of immersion. Maybe Subnautica? But that game is nowhere near as good, methinks.
Between uncovering and appraising lost treasures, discovering new species to add to the marine encyclopedia, and mapping uncharted waters, it feels like there's so much to do. I actually wouldn't be surprised if this was the only single-player game I've played where I've surpassed the 100-hour playtime mark. As someone who rarely replays games, I never really considered having a comfort game, but sitting here writing this review has made me re-evaluate that. In fact, I have the sudden urge to replay this.
Stasis: Bone Totem
2023
[guy who hasn’t played any adventure games besides Disco Elysium] Hmm...getting a lot of "Disco Elysium" vibes from this...
I think Stasis: Bone Totem is something of a victim of its own fan base. While I try not to let other peoples’ opinions of games influence my own, it’s impossible to fully deny that something getting wall-to-wall praise is going to set my expectations high. I’ve scarcely heard a single bad word said about any aspect of this besides the AI art that it launched with, and that all got patched out. This has a steep enough rating curve to suggest that it’s phenomenal. And while Stasis: Bone Totem is definitely good, I think that’s about all that it manages to be. This isn’t the earth-shaker that was promised. But hell, what is? We can’t all be juggernauts. There’s hardly anything wrong with only being good.
It’s not difficult to see why people love this game as much as they do. It has an interesting world, interesting characters, wonderful audio design, and a truly impressive pre-rendered graphical style on the interactables that hearkens back to old CD-ROM adventure games. I would die for Moses, but he wouldn’t want that for me. The relationship that he develops with Faran is far and away the juiciest piece of meat that the game asks you to sink your teeth into. Calaban is a distant second, though he’s still enjoyable; the irony is that the married couple seem to have the least chemistry out of anyone aboard this abandoned ship. I definitely think that the game tries to lean a bit too hard into crafting arc phrases that get repeated over and over and over again — every character independently thinks to themselves that "all you need to do is blink" for something to change — but there's a charm to it. Again, it's carried hard by Moses. He's a simple bear, but he's got a good soul. There's something deeply upsetting about a childish AI struggling to deal with feelings of loss and grief that it wasn't built to understand that could (and probably should have) carried this entire game by itself. I mostly just wanted everyone else to stop talking because they were taking up valuable screen time that otherwise would have gone to Moses and Faran, who remain two of the greatest homies to ever hang out on the bottom of the ocean floor.
While I liked the dialog, the narration prose gets on my nerves. Olga Moskvina is credited as the sole writer for the environmental descriptions — knowing that she worked on Disco Elysium before Stasis: Bone Totem is nothing short of shocking, seeing how steeply the writing quality has declined from that game to this one. A friend of mine spent several evenings trying to cope with the fact that Michael Kirkbride wrote Immortals of Aveum, and all of the laughter I directed at him has now rocketed back to me at double the velocity. How do you fall off this hard? This fiercely? I was convinced that it was all being written by someone who had never written before, not by a co-writer of one of my favorite pieces of media ever released.
Ten-dollar words are everywhere in every little green blob, covering them like smallpox blisters. So much of the vocabulary here feels almost as though it was destroyed in the editing stage by someone doing right-click thesaurus swaps on every other word. I feel like I'm reading something that was put together solely to flex the author's new English-to-Lovecraft translation program. Even the most boring of objects are "eldritch", or "Stygian", or "noctilucent", or any other archaic-ass word that doesn't quite mean what the writer seems to think they do. An emptied suitcase isn't an empty suitcase, it's "disemboweled". A film on top of water isn't an oily film, but an "odorous waxy complexion". Even when you are looking at something that's meant to be horrifying, the prose mostly just makes me roll my eyes; a cesspit of blood and bodies is described as a "thickening grume-river of congealed blood and matted offal [which] incites bubbles that vomit up distressing fetors of deep decay". Perhaps the worst of the lot is the simple statement that a bench "broadcasts discomfort". Ugh.
A big part of what I liked about Disco Elysium was the fact that it used some remarkably simple prose to convey some very heavy topics. It was as accessible as it was powerful. Similarly, a big part of what I liked about The Devil's Imago was that it knew when to invoke the sublime and when to dial it back; that which was beautiful was described as though it was beautiful, and the mundane was described as mundane. Disco Elysium was broadly simple, and The Devil's Imago was broadly complex, but neither of those works pigeon-holed themselves into being all of one or all of the other. There's nothing wrong with being straightforward as much as there's nothing wrong with being oblique, but when you're garrulously invoking expressions and articulations absent the favorable junction of circumstances by which your inscriptions may abide — that is to say, when you're dropping endless strings of big, fancy words without giving the rest of your writing a chance to breathe — it makes your work look amateurish.
I have to conclude that this is, ultimately, a directorial problem. I know that Olga Moskvina is capable of far better than what's here; I've read her poetry, and I've read her contributions to Disco Elysium. She's capable of some stunningly beautiful prose, and none of her other work falls into the overly-verbose trappings of the environmental descriptions in Stasis: Bone Totem. She writes with rhythm everywhere but here. The original Stasis had a similar problem — provided you consider any of what I've complained about here to be "a problem" — which only furthers my belief that she was encouraged to mangle her writing to make it fit into this universe. It's as if she was told to make it more gross every time she submitted a draft. This is like how potato chips were invented. Fifth tit revision in a row.
It's here that I realize that I've dedicated about six hundred words purely to Olga Moskvina's incidental descriptions and that there are other aspects of the game worth discussing. A decent pivot would be to say that this devolves into being tonally all over the place by the end of the game. Moses and Faran both die at the same time, with Faran succumbing to the loss of his life support, and Moses tearing himself in half to get the rescue suit to his humans. We're treated to a cutscene where Mac cries the Tear of the Goofy Goober over the sound of tinkling piano keys. He then rips the medkit off of the support suit that Moses died to retrieve and triumphantly states "Hmph! Medical kit retrieved!" not even five seconds later. He's back to sighing and rolling his eyes at the Russian ghost in his brain while Charlie lays dying of ancient parasites not ten feet away, so it's good to know that there's nothing so serious as to stop Mac from looking to camera like Office Jim whenever he discovers a new world-shattering revelation. Stone Age island-dwelling molepeople sank to the bottom of the ocean where they founded Latin American Atlantis and are currently preparing to re-invade the surface world, and Mac mostly just seems annoyed by the whole affair. Hell, Mac, I feel you. I can't pretend like this isn't stupid either.
Ultimately, Stasis: Bone Totem is good. I just can't shake the feeling that something is missing. Looking at all of the pieces individually, I feel like this should all work together; you assemble them into a singular work, and it feels like it's less than the sum of of its parts. Maybe that's wrong. It might be that the parts themselves failed to live up to their own potential. In the places where this had every opportunity to be a slam dunk, it instead manages only to drop in a lay-up, and the two points you get from the latter aren't worth the same two points you get from the former. Nobody's ever made a highlight reel worth watching comprised of just finger rolls.
I got the transcendence chip so that my immortal soul can go to the Nexus, sponsored by Walmart.
I think Stasis: Bone Totem is something of a victim of its own fan base. While I try not to let other peoples’ opinions of games influence my own, it’s impossible to fully deny that something getting wall-to-wall praise is going to set my expectations high. I’ve scarcely heard a single bad word said about any aspect of this besides the AI art that it launched with, and that all got patched out. This has a steep enough rating curve to suggest that it’s phenomenal. And while Stasis: Bone Totem is definitely good, I think that’s about all that it manages to be. This isn’t the earth-shaker that was promised. But hell, what is? We can’t all be juggernauts. There’s hardly anything wrong with only being good.
It’s not difficult to see why people love this game as much as they do. It has an interesting world, interesting characters, wonderful audio design, and a truly impressive pre-rendered graphical style on the interactables that hearkens back to old CD-ROM adventure games. I would die for Moses, but he wouldn’t want that for me. The relationship that he develops with Faran is far and away the juiciest piece of meat that the game asks you to sink your teeth into. Calaban is a distant second, though he’s still enjoyable; the irony is that the married couple seem to have the least chemistry out of anyone aboard this abandoned ship. I definitely think that the game tries to lean a bit too hard into crafting arc phrases that get repeated over and over and over again — every character independently thinks to themselves that "all you need to do is blink" for something to change — but there's a charm to it. Again, it's carried hard by Moses. He's a simple bear, but he's got a good soul. There's something deeply upsetting about a childish AI struggling to deal with feelings of loss and grief that it wasn't built to understand that could (and probably should have) carried this entire game by itself. I mostly just wanted everyone else to stop talking because they were taking up valuable screen time that otherwise would have gone to Moses and Faran, who remain two of the greatest homies to ever hang out on the bottom of the ocean floor.
While I liked the dialog, the narration prose gets on my nerves. Olga Moskvina is credited as the sole writer for the environmental descriptions — knowing that she worked on Disco Elysium before Stasis: Bone Totem is nothing short of shocking, seeing how steeply the writing quality has declined from that game to this one. A friend of mine spent several evenings trying to cope with the fact that Michael Kirkbride wrote Immortals of Aveum, and all of the laughter I directed at him has now rocketed back to me at double the velocity. How do you fall off this hard? This fiercely? I was convinced that it was all being written by someone who had never written before, not by a co-writer of one of my favorite pieces of media ever released.
Ten-dollar words are everywhere in every little green blob, covering them like smallpox blisters. So much of the vocabulary here feels almost as though it was destroyed in the editing stage by someone doing right-click thesaurus swaps on every other word. I feel like I'm reading something that was put together solely to flex the author's new English-to-Lovecraft translation program. Even the most boring of objects are "eldritch", or "Stygian", or "noctilucent", or any other archaic-ass word that doesn't quite mean what the writer seems to think they do. An emptied suitcase isn't an empty suitcase, it's "disemboweled". A film on top of water isn't an oily film, but an "odorous waxy complexion". Even when you are looking at something that's meant to be horrifying, the prose mostly just makes me roll my eyes; a cesspit of blood and bodies is described as a "thickening grume-river of congealed blood and matted offal [which] incites bubbles that vomit up distressing fetors of deep decay". Perhaps the worst of the lot is the simple statement that a bench "broadcasts discomfort". Ugh.
A big part of what I liked about Disco Elysium was the fact that it used some remarkably simple prose to convey some very heavy topics. It was as accessible as it was powerful. Similarly, a big part of what I liked about The Devil's Imago was that it knew when to invoke the sublime and when to dial it back; that which was beautiful was described as though it was beautiful, and the mundane was described as mundane. Disco Elysium was broadly simple, and The Devil's Imago was broadly complex, but neither of those works pigeon-holed themselves into being all of one or all of the other. There's nothing wrong with being straightforward as much as there's nothing wrong with being oblique, but when you're garrulously invoking expressions and articulations absent the favorable junction of circumstances by which your inscriptions may abide — that is to say, when you're dropping endless strings of big, fancy words without giving the rest of your writing a chance to breathe — it makes your work look amateurish.
I have to conclude that this is, ultimately, a directorial problem. I know that Olga Moskvina is capable of far better than what's here; I've read her poetry, and I've read her contributions to Disco Elysium. She's capable of some stunningly beautiful prose, and none of her other work falls into the overly-verbose trappings of the environmental descriptions in Stasis: Bone Totem. She writes with rhythm everywhere but here. The original Stasis had a similar problem — provided you consider any of what I've complained about here to be "a problem" — which only furthers my belief that she was encouraged to mangle her writing to make it fit into this universe. It's as if she was told to make it more gross every time she submitted a draft. This is like how potato chips were invented. Fifth tit revision in a row.
It's here that I realize that I've dedicated about six hundred words purely to Olga Moskvina's incidental descriptions and that there are other aspects of the game worth discussing. A decent pivot would be to say that this devolves into being tonally all over the place by the end of the game. Moses and Faran both die at the same time, with Faran succumbing to the loss of his life support, and Moses tearing himself in half to get the rescue suit to his humans. We're treated to a cutscene where Mac cries the Tear of the Goofy Goober over the sound of tinkling piano keys. He then rips the medkit off of the support suit that Moses died to retrieve and triumphantly states "Hmph! Medical kit retrieved!" not even five seconds later. He's back to sighing and rolling his eyes at the Russian ghost in his brain while Charlie lays dying of ancient parasites not ten feet away, so it's good to know that there's nothing so serious as to stop Mac from looking to camera like Office Jim whenever he discovers a new world-shattering revelation. Stone Age island-dwelling molepeople sank to the bottom of the ocean where they founded Latin American Atlantis and are currently preparing to re-invade the surface world, and Mac mostly just seems annoyed by the whole affair. Hell, Mac, I feel you. I can't pretend like this isn't stupid either.
Ultimately, Stasis: Bone Totem is good. I just can't shake the feeling that something is missing. Looking at all of the pieces individually, I feel like this should all work together; you assemble them into a singular work, and it feels like it's less than the sum of of its parts. Maybe that's wrong. It might be that the parts themselves failed to live up to their own potential. In the places where this had every opportunity to be a slam dunk, it instead manages only to drop in a lay-up, and the two points you get from the latter aren't worth the same two points you get from the former. Nobody's ever made a highlight reel worth watching comprised of just finger rolls.
I got the transcendence chip so that my immortal soul can go to the Nexus, sponsored by Walmart.
Nightmare Kart
2024
Holy shit I was not expecting to have that much fun with this. Nightmare Kart is what happens when someone with too much autism plays a 24 hour marathon of Mario Kart and Bloodborne (or judging by the style this game is going for, Nightmare Creatures). It's a gothic horror hack and slash on wheels, with plenty of grotesque characters to see.
Now when I heard "Bloodborne as a 90's kart racer", I thought "That's probably gonna be fun for 5 minutes, not that great as an actual racer." Nightmare Kart looked at past me with spite, and proceeded to be an amazing and fun as fuck kart racer. The items are simple, yet enjoyable, and the track design is imaginative and fun. Although some mechanics that confused me were the difference between drifting and power braking (although that may just be me being an idiot), and tricks (which you have to do in the air, not while your jumping off a ramp, thanks Mario Kart muscle memory).
Oh, by the way, did you know this game has a story? I haven't seen a kart racer with a story in a long while. You play as the Hunter, racing through gothic streets, spooky forests, and Clock Tower-ass clock towers, all in search for the origin of the Nightmare you're all trapped in. It even has boss fights! Fun boss fights at that! I think Nicholas may be up there as one of my favorite bosses in a video game (he's just so much fun)!
All and all, this game was treat. I loved every second of it, and I might even go back to 100% it.
MAY THIS NIGHTMARE NEVER END!!
Now when I heard "Bloodborne as a 90's kart racer", I thought "That's probably gonna be fun for 5 minutes, not that great as an actual racer." Nightmare Kart looked at past me with spite, and proceeded to be an amazing and fun as fuck kart racer. The items are simple, yet enjoyable, and the track design is imaginative and fun. Although some mechanics that confused me were the difference between drifting and power braking (although that may just be me being an idiot), and tricks (which you have to do in the air, not while your jumping off a ramp, thanks Mario Kart muscle memory).
Oh, by the way, did you know this game has a story? I haven't seen a kart racer with a story in a long while. You play as the Hunter, racing through gothic streets, spooky forests, and Clock Tower-ass clock towers, all in search for the origin of the Nightmare you're all trapped in. It even has boss fights! Fun boss fights at that! I think Nicholas may be up there as one of my favorite bosses in a video game (he's just so much fun)!
All and all, this game was treat. I loved every second of it, and I might even go back to 100% it.
MAY THIS NIGHTMARE NEVER END!!
Nightmare Kart
2024
I feel like, intellectually, I only have nice things to say about Not-Bloodborne Kart. Its got incredible presentation, with a mix of well-planned and well-choreographed cinematics as well as a faithful but lively PS1 user experience. The inclusion of guns and combat in a kart racer feels pretty solid, managing to avoid feeling unintuitive or janky in like 99.9% of situations you can find yourself in. The kart racing itself is mostly competent, I find it difficult to complain about the game itself - and certainly I find this to be a better platform for Liliths creativity than Bloodborne Demake was.
But man…. something about it makes me feel slightly hollow. I guess the best way I could phrase this is: its still not a very exciting use of Bloodborne. Yeah, its Not-Bloodborne now and yeah, its mostly a comedy game, but theres also attempts at staging tension and bravado with Nightmare Karts facsimile of Bloodbornes narrative and..... idk. It just leaves you wondering why some parts were so important and worth being tributized and other parts werent so much. No Yahar’gul? No forest race track? Shadows of Yharnam but no Rom? No Amygdalas? You got Astral Clocktower and Maria but no mfing Fishing Hamlet?? Theres just weird representation choices here - but thankfully the humor takes the opportunity to incorporate quite a few. Church Giants squeezing into a kart or the fact that the Bloated Pig is a vehicle are excellent decisions.
In fact despite some of my reservation I actually have to give it a full star exclusively for the fact that, in addition to Nicolas J Micolash’s kart being just him running like a lunatic on foot, his death scream is also like a 15 second long reverb-laiden howl that can be heard no matter where you are on the track. It just absolutely floors me every single time I hear it like "ooooooooooooyyYYYAAAAARGHAHHHHHHHH"
But man…. something about it makes me feel slightly hollow. I guess the best way I could phrase this is: its still not a very exciting use of Bloodborne. Yeah, its Not-Bloodborne now and yeah, its mostly a comedy game, but theres also attempts at staging tension and bravado with Nightmare Karts facsimile of Bloodbornes narrative and..... idk. It just leaves you wondering why some parts were so important and worth being tributized and other parts werent so much. No Yahar’gul? No forest race track? Shadows of Yharnam but no Rom? No Amygdalas? You got Astral Clocktower and Maria but no mfing Fishing Hamlet?? Theres just weird representation choices here - but thankfully the humor takes the opportunity to incorporate quite a few. Church Giants squeezing into a kart or the fact that the Bloated Pig is a vehicle are excellent decisions.
In fact despite some of my reservation I actually have to give it a full star exclusively for the fact that, in addition to Nicolas J Micolash’s kart being just him running like a lunatic on foot, his death scream is also like a 15 second long reverb-laiden howl that can be heard no matter where you are on the track. It just absolutely floors me every single time I hear it like "ooooooooooooyyYYYAAAAARGHAHHHHHHHH"
Ultimate Spider-Man
2005
I'd like to say "this hasn't aged well" and be done with it, but that is NOT ALLOWED! If I said that, they'd put me in the stockades again, and I'm not going back there!!
I never got into the Ultimate Spider-Man comics back in the day. I don't like to dog on anyone's art, but Mark Bagley's interpretation of these characters was always a barrier, and it turns out they look pretty bad when rendered through a Nintendo Gamecube, too. However, if you asked me what my favorite pre-Marvel's Spider-Man game was at any point prior to this last weekend, I'd say Ultimate Spider-Man. Probably talk about how good the web-slinging was, or how neat the stylized comic book panel cutscenes were.
It's easy to assign a high level of quality to something you haven't touched for about twenty years.
Everything in this game feels weightless, Peter most of all as any punch to the nose will send him flying several miles away, rag-dolling at maximum velocity into the cold depths of the Hudson. Combat, traversal, even the level of mission variety just feels so flat, so bodyless that at several points I started to question if I accidentally downloaded a beta. I remember it being better than this, but apparently I just got way into a budget mid-2000s action game. I remember booting this up just to swing around for hours, not really doing anything. Real "playing with rocks" behavior.
Turns out me not actually doing anything when revisiting the game is partly a consequence of the game providing nothing to do. Side missions are divided between races and "tours" of combat that send you between points to beat up a few bad guys. Occasionally you'll be called upon to stop a crime in progress or swing someone with a tummy ache to the hospital (Spider-Man is a friend to those with IBD), but there's just not much going on in New York. Unfortunately, the game forces you to complete a pre-requisite amount of these missions before continuing with the story, and despite never being a tall task, it is incredibly mind numbing.
The main story missions are lacking in variety, too. Almost all of them follow the same pattern of chasing a villain from Spider-Man's rogues gallery and then doing battle with them. The chase sequences are lengthy and lacking in any sense of flow, and battles largely boil down to dodging attacks while waiting for the enemy to become vulnerable, then doing a hit-and-run for a small amount of damage. My favorite. There's like, five things to do in this game and they're all unengaging.
I don't even care for the story, which treads a bit too close to "it's all fate" for my liking. Peter and Eddie Brock's dads were both working on the Venom symbiote prior to their deaths, and apparently some of Richard Parker's DNA made it into the suit (he came a little), which creates a unique bond between it and Peter. I think part of what makes Spider-Man so appealing is that anybody could be him, Peter was just the right guy in the right place at the right time. Ultimate's story takes away from that and is worse for it.
Peter is also written to be an insufferable jerkass with no redeeming qualities, something Sean Marquette does an admirable job at capturing with his line delivery. Don't get me wrong, while half of Sean's acting credits in games are cited as "reused grunts," I'm sure he's a perfectly good actor who was turning in the performance expected of him. I pin the blame on bad writing and poor direction.
anyway, i'm giving this game an extra star because it never at any point made me play as Mary Jane
I never got into the Ultimate Spider-Man comics back in the day. I don't like to dog on anyone's art, but Mark Bagley's interpretation of these characters was always a barrier, and it turns out they look pretty bad when rendered through a Nintendo Gamecube, too. However, if you asked me what my favorite pre-Marvel's Spider-Man game was at any point prior to this last weekend, I'd say Ultimate Spider-Man. Probably talk about how good the web-slinging was, or how neat the stylized comic book panel cutscenes were.
It's easy to assign a high level of quality to something you haven't touched for about twenty years.
Everything in this game feels weightless, Peter most of all as any punch to the nose will send him flying several miles away, rag-dolling at maximum velocity into the cold depths of the Hudson. Combat, traversal, even the level of mission variety just feels so flat, so bodyless that at several points I started to question if I accidentally downloaded a beta. I remember it being better than this, but apparently I just got way into a budget mid-2000s action game. I remember booting this up just to swing around for hours, not really doing anything. Real "playing with rocks" behavior.
Turns out me not actually doing anything when revisiting the game is partly a consequence of the game providing nothing to do. Side missions are divided between races and "tours" of combat that send you between points to beat up a few bad guys. Occasionally you'll be called upon to stop a crime in progress or swing someone with a tummy ache to the hospital (Spider-Man is a friend to those with IBD), but there's just not much going on in New York. Unfortunately, the game forces you to complete a pre-requisite amount of these missions before continuing with the story, and despite never being a tall task, it is incredibly mind numbing.
The main story missions are lacking in variety, too. Almost all of them follow the same pattern of chasing a villain from Spider-Man's rogues gallery and then doing battle with them. The chase sequences are lengthy and lacking in any sense of flow, and battles largely boil down to dodging attacks while waiting for the enemy to become vulnerable, then doing a hit-and-run for a small amount of damage. My favorite. There's like, five things to do in this game and they're all unengaging.
I don't even care for the story, which treads a bit too close to "it's all fate" for my liking. Peter and Eddie Brock's dads were both working on the Venom symbiote prior to their deaths, and apparently some of Richard Parker's DNA made it into the suit (he came a little), which creates a unique bond between it and Peter. I think part of what makes Spider-Man so appealing is that anybody could be him, Peter was just the right guy in the right place at the right time. Ultimate's story takes away from that and is worse for it.
Peter is also written to be an insufferable jerkass with no redeeming qualities, something Sean Marquette does an admirable job at capturing with his line delivery. Don't get me wrong, while half of Sean's acting credits in games are cited as "reused grunts," I'm sure he's a perfectly good actor who was turning in the performance expected of him. I pin the blame on bad writing and poor direction.
anyway, i'm giving this game an extra star because it never at any point made me play as Mary Jane
Completion Criteria: All Collected + Ending
I'm quite surprised this game is good. I expected it to be recommended as a joke but it's a pretty competent and short Metroidvania that by the end may have the most fun spiderman combat I've seen outside of fighting games. It does have a mandatory touch screen sequence but it basically acts as a mini game. Succinct and would recommend.
I'm quite surprised this game is good. I expected it to be recommended as a joke but it's a pretty competent and short Metroidvania that by the end may have the most fun spiderman combat I've seen outside of fighting games. It does have a mandatory touch screen sequence but it basically acts as a mini game. Succinct and would recommend.
The Thousand-Year Door defies belief twice over. First, that a Mario adventure with this amount of creative liberty was ever allowed to exist in the first place; and second, after over a decade where Nintendo seemed eager to bury this era as deeply as possible, that they BROUGHT IT BACK.
I will admit upfront that the first three Paper Mario games have been some of the most influential in my life - on my taste, my art style, even the types of stories I want to tell. But ironically, despite the remake's many improvements, the differences in graphics and music were enough to finally clear the haze of reverence from my brain, and for the first time I could actually fully see and internalize a lot of the common complaints about this game. Ok, yeah, the level design loves tunneling you through corridors, even in comparison to the first Paper Mario's more frequently wide-open and organic spaces. Yes, some segments can be kind of a slog if the story isn't grabbing you (or in my case, if you already know everything that happens and just want to get to your favorite parts). Put this next to Origami King or even Color Splash, and the amount of delight you'd have in exploring and solving puzzles in the actual overworld in the latter two is night and day with TTYD.
But I still think these complaints pale in comparison to this game's positives: a project made with a startling amount of heart, sincerity, creativity, depth, passion- and yes, a heaping of very bizarre humor. It might feel a little cringe to praise the emotional storytelling of a Mario game, and I know there are plenty of games out there that hit the heartstrings more deftly, and you may argue that a Mario product doesn't need all this, but- the fact that it's Super Mario is the POINT. When you grow up with something like TTYD or SPM and say "Wait, a Mario game can be THIS? You can just have a Bob-omb read a letter from his dead wife that says 'time, like love, is a tide?' And later that Bob-omb becomes dear friends with a soul-eating ancient pirate who is seemingly composed of the piled-up and recombined bones of his long-dead crew?" then you come to the conclusion that rules for storytelling exist to be broken. No franchise, no matter how silly, should be off-limits for expressing the sincerest thoughts and wildest ideas of those working on it. It's an officially-endorsed fanfic full of OCs and their very human flaws and motivations and struggles, and that's wonderful. There are character arcs. There are enough mini-stories in this larger story that something, at least something, will resonate with YOU personally. It's a game that feels like it had very little limitations placed upon it when it was being made, and it makes you want to take off your own self-imposed limitations too.
The most gratifying part about the remake is that it was crafted with the amount of care and love that its fans have long thought this game deserved. Even the most minor of characters have new expressions and animations, and the difference this makes to certain key story moments make the original scenes seem rather lifeless and silly by comparison, no matter how cool they might have seemed in our imaginations. The sound designers and composers at Intelligent have learned a lot in recent Paper Mario games about integrating music into the overall impact and humor of the experience, and TTYD is now brimming with not only new remixes but entirely new songs that punctuate the drama and humor of the plot. Add in some new quality-of-life changes, unlockable concept art that is absolutely mind-blowing for longtime fans to see after two decades, and a bit of brand-new content, and the remake creates a definitive experience that makes me feel like I can put the original away in a place of honor and maybe never take it back out again.
As someone who likes every Paper Mario game (....well, except for a certain handheld entry) for its own reasons, I feel a peace now as a fan that I haven't experienced in a very long time. I don't want to argue about which Paper Mario game is the best (and my favorite is SPM, so I know I'm losing anyway). I just want a new generation to appreciate this game for their own sake, and for it to mean something to them as it has to me. I'm seeing that happen, and it's beautiful.
In conclusion, they put kazoos in the background music when Flavio is following you around, and I NEED MORE THAN FIVE STARS TO GIVE
I will admit upfront that the first three Paper Mario games have been some of the most influential in my life - on my taste, my art style, even the types of stories I want to tell. But ironically, despite the remake's many improvements, the differences in graphics and music were enough to finally clear the haze of reverence from my brain, and for the first time I could actually fully see and internalize a lot of the common complaints about this game. Ok, yeah, the level design loves tunneling you through corridors, even in comparison to the first Paper Mario's more frequently wide-open and organic spaces. Yes, some segments can be kind of a slog if the story isn't grabbing you (or in my case, if you already know everything that happens and just want to get to your favorite parts). Put this next to Origami King or even Color Splash, and the amount of delight you'd have in exploring and solving puzzles in the actual overworld in the latter two is night and day with TTYD.
But I still think these complaints pale in comparison to this game's positives: a project made with a startling amount of heart, sincerity, creativity, depth, passion- and yes, a heaping of very bizarre humor. It might feel a little cringe to praise the emotional storytelling of a Mario game, and I know there are plenty of games out there that hit the heartstrings more deftly, and you may argue that a Mario product doesn't need all this, but- the fact that it's Super Mario is the POINT. When you grow up with something like TTYD or SPM and say "Wait, a Mario game can be THIS? You can just have a Bob-omb read a letter from his dead wife that says 'time, like love, is a tide?' And later that Bob-omb becomes dear friends with a soul-eating ancient pirate who is seemingly composed of the piled-up and recombined bones of his long-dead crew?" then you come to the conclusion that rules for storytelling exist to be broken. No franchise, no matter how silly, should be off-limits for expressing the sincerest thoughts and wildest ideas of those working on it. It's an officially-endorsed fanfic full of OCs and their very human flaws and motivations and struggles, and that's wonderful. There are character arcs. There are enough mini-stories in this larger story that something, at least something, will resonate with YOU personally. It's a game that feels like it had very little limitations placed upon it when it was being made, and it makes you want to take off your own self-imposed limitations too.
The most gratifying part about the remake is that it was crafted with the amount of care and love that its fans have long thought this game deserved. Even the most minor of characters have new expressions and animations, and the difference this makes to certain key story moments make the original scenes seem rather lifeless and silly by comparison, no matter how cool they might have seemed in our imaginations. The sound designers and composers at Intelligent have learned a lot in recent Paper Mario games about integrating music into the overall impact and humor of the experience, and TTYD is now brimming with not only new remixes but entirely new songs that punctuate the drama and humor of the plot. Add in some new quality-of-life changes, unlockable concept art that is absolutely mind-blowing for longtime fans to see after two decades, and a bit of brand-new content, and the remake creates a definitive experience that makes me feel like I can put the original away in a place of honor and maybe never take it back out again.
As someone who likes every Paper Mario game (....well, except for a certain handheld entry) for its own reasons, I feel a peace now as a fan that I haven't experienced in a very long time. I don't want to argue about which Paper Mario game is the best (and my favorite is SPM, so I know I'm losing anyway). I just want a new generation to appreciate this game for their own sake, and for it to mean something to them as it has to me. I'm seeing that happen, and it's beautiful.
In conclusion, they put kazoos in the background music when Flavio is following you around, and I NEED MORE THAN FIVE STARS TO GIVE
WarioWare Gold
2018
If you combined portions of Warioware Mega Microgames, Twisted, and Touched, you'd essentially have Warioware Gold. For the most part, everything flows together well and it's pretty easy switching between the forms of control since it's all within the palms of your hand, so mastering the juggle of every type of minigame is quite satisfying. That said, I do think that the game lacks a bit of novelty despite how cohesive the whole experience is, with a good chunk of the library's microgames brought back from prior installments. The few minigames that I've played that combined multiple different control forms (control pad, gyro controls, touch screen, and mic) were fantastic, such as the final boss fight and the Mewtroid minigame, I just wish there were more of them bundled into the core experience to maximize the potential of the 3DS. In addition, a lot of my previous complaints from Touched (that is, the touchscreen minigames are a tad too easy and are all some form of poke or drag, and the mic minigames can all be won by yelling loudly enough at the right time) do carry over which lessens the overall package a little bit, but it's still a pretty fun experience that I can see myself coming back to considering how much stuff there is to unlock and all the arcade and challenge modes to mix everything around. As such, I maintain that Gold doesn't have as distinct of an identity as the other games before it as someone who's gone through a lot of the series' history, though the cleaned up visuals are surprisingly charming and the classic absurdist tone (noting that I actually don't mind the voice acting) and silly slice-of-life background threads are all still there; if you don't feel the need to revisit all the prior games, then you could definitely do a lot worse than the compilation of most of its best moments.
"Of all the creatures I've met you are the most beautiful."
Breathtaking, funny, heartwarming, melancholic, sorrowful, regretful, painful. The feeling of mourning someone who isn't dead, the headache that just won't stop, the stretch of death that doesn't wash out. Trying to move on, the pain that comes with that and the bittersweet aftertaste that may never truly leave you. This is something that will never leave me, words don't do it justice. Harry Du Bois, I love you so much.
Breathtaking, funny, heartwarming, melancholic, sorrowful, regretful, painful. The feeling of mourning someone who isn't dead, the headache that just won't stop, the stretch of death that doesn't wash out. Trying to move on, the pain that comes with that and the bittersweet aftertaste that may never truly leave you. This is something that will never leave me, words don't do it justice. Harry Du Bois, I love you so much.
Final Fantasy XV
2016
With how much of an emphasis critiques of FFXV place on its mythical development history and mountains of side material, I’m surprised by how uneventful my reasons for not really vibing with it are??? Its empty open world, bland script, unengaging combat, and extreme level of systems bloat are all just common factors of big budget AAA games. Even its much talked about misogyny and its less talked about masturbatory obsession with divine right of kings are issues that existed within the RPG genre since Day 1. There are things I like about it (Chapters 6 and 11 have really cool set pieces that use Noctis’s teleportation moveset well, Chapter 13 places interesting limitations to work around, and main antagonist Ardyn is just an endearing kind of camp) and I can kind of see an argument in favor of it as this story of a person in his formative years losing every little piece of his newfound agency until the ending but it’s hard for me to be sold on everything Noctis has lost when after a certain point, the game literally lets you travel back in time to access the open world because god forbid a player could miss out on content. Like idk, with how Final Fantasy stands as quite possibly the most interesting, experimental and artistically accomplished series in the medium, I just didn’t expect my reasons for finally finding one I disliked out of the 11 mainlines and 1 spin-off I played to be things as boring as it has conventional AAA open world game design.
Also, on the topic of its misogyny, people criticizing it on that front should bring up its attempt at “more female CEOs” style liberal “feminism” with that one town that has a workforce that’s primarily women more often because it’s extremely funny.
Also, on the topic of its misogyny, people criticizing it on that front should bring up its attempt at “more female CEOs” style liberal “feminism” with that one town that has a workforce that’s primarily women more often because it’s extremely funny.
Sally Face
2016
Don't forget to sally your face every morning before going to work! Otherwise... face, meet pavement, pavement, meet face. Sally Face has the tact of a podcaster and you can smell the same putrid odor through the screen. There is a marginal difference between Axe spray and whatever awaits in Sally Face, but a difference nonetheless. It's more interested in dangling a mystery in front of you than delivering a fun experience, ultimately deciding to to close up shop permanently while every worker was on active shift. I think I expertly performed every action to miss extra dialogue I could in episode 4, I've got a knack for this. Some of the things these fellas say are very surprising, so I really missed an opportunity to read gross conversations.
Sal Fischer is not like the other girls. He's a boy. Poor poor baby he went through so much 🥺 he may or may not have Hatsune Miku chilling in the family tree. Let's see how the lack of a mother figure will impact this child. On the other end, how the lack of a father figure will impact his best friend. That would be Larry not Butz. mf Larry's nose should be considered a lethal weapon, he could have stabbed all these residents in a jiffy. He's a good guy though he won't do that. I thought it would be big enough to smell ghosts though, or bullshit, or anything but that damn bologna. Aside from him, there's a fat ass cat lmao and aside from that cat, Sal has a friend group. A woman, gay people and a black dude. He's meeting the Netflix quotas to a T. Good for him.
It's a game made on Unity by one guy. With that in mind, it still doesn't fare that well. There is nothing that would have matched the game's vibe as perfectly as fighting an eldritch monster midair by playing the guitar, following a cult doing its best to enjoy the game's age rating to the fullest. Kids these days. Anything but a job 😭 All the complaints about episode 5 are pretty much true in my highly educated opinion. I feel the air leaving my lungs as the characters begin to yap the most generic sentences just to fill air. If this was done on purpose for the vibe, congratulations, if this was not done on purpose, congratulations (he believes in celebrating the work of independent creators). Actually, building a quick 3d project for 10 minutes of gameplay is pretty cool. The finale went through a few artstyles and none felt particularly out of place.
If you played this and think you ate, think carefully about what you've just eaten. Does it matter whether you knew what were the ingredients? Eh. Call it Google the way I have the Drive to choke on my plate. The episodes might almost work as standalones ngl. Don't jump in the middle obviously, although I don't think you can. I wonder what's the pipeline with Sally Face diehard fans btw but I have a feeling the fandom overlaps with Hetalia or some shit idk why. Well, lovely venture. Moral is never let an eboy in church again unless he's professionally trained for it. Nah even then. Never forget the bite of '88 it comes after 87 the previous number yep
Sal Fischer is not like the other girls. He's a boy. Poor poor baby he went through so much 🥺 he may or may not have Hatsune Miku chilling in the family tree. Let's see how the lack of a mother figure will impact this child. On the other end, how the lack of a father figure will impact his best friend. That would be Larry not Butz. mf Larry's nose should be considered a lethal weapon, he could have stabbed all these residents in a jiffy. He's a good guy though he won't do that. I thought it would be big enough to smell ghosts though, or bullshit, or anything but that damn bologna. Aside from him, there's a fat ass cat lmao and aside from that cat, Sal has a friend group. A woman, gay people and a black dude. He's meeting the Netflix quotas to a T. Good for him.
It's a game made on Unity by one guy. With that in mind, it still doesn't fare that well. There is nothing that would have matched the game's vibe as perfectly as fighting an eldritch monster midair by playing the guitar, following a cult doing its best to enjoy the game's age rating to the fullest. Kids these days. Anything but a job 😭 All the complaints about episode 5 are pretty much true in my highly educated opinion. I feel the air leaving my lungs as the characters begin to yap the most generic sentences just to fill air. If this was done on purpose for the vibe, congratulations, if this was not done on purpose, congratulations (he believes in celebrating the work of independent creators). Actually, building a quick 3d project for 10 minutes of gameplay is pretty cool. The finale went through a few artstyles and none felt particularly out of place.
If you played this and think you ate, think carefully about what you've just eaten. Does it matter whether you knew what were the ingredients? Eh. Call it Google the way I have the Drive to choke on my plate. The episodes might almost work as standalones ngl. Don't jump in the middle obviously, although I don't think you can. I wonder what's the pipeline with Sally Face diehard fans btw but I have a feeling the fandom overlaps with Hetalia or some shit idk why. Well, lovely venture. Moral is never let an eboy in church again unless he's professionally trained for it. Nah even then. Never forget the bite of '88 it comes after 87 the previous number yep
Twisted Metal: Black
2001
This is by no means a proper postmortem of the "car combat" genre, but a recent viewer e-mail on The Jeff Gerstmann Show got me thinking about Twisted Metal and and the near total abandonment of the type of gameplay it innovated. To hear Gerstmann explain it, the advent of more sophisticated control schemes and adoption of first person shooters on console contributed to an erosion of interest in car combat. He points to the need to gas and brake to simulate the fluidity of movement FPS games required as being a problem later solved by analog controls, though some single-analog games still employ a similar control style, like KISS Psycho Circus, a classic! I see the logic here. Twisted Metal was the only franchise with legs, and the rapid pace of change game design was undergoing in the mid-to-late 90s meant a lot of genres phased in and out of existence.
I decided to put together a committee to further investigate the demise of the genre, comprised of my friends Larry Davis, TransWitchSammy, and Appreciations. When asked what they thought of Twisted Metal and what contributed to the withering of the genre, the most interesting answer came from Appreciations, who posited that games like Grand Theft Auto III incorporated some staples of car combat into larger and more ambitious experiences, which further lessened the need for more bespoke vehicle-based brawling. Satisfied, I pressed two of the big red buttons on my console and dropped Larry and Sammy into a subterranean furnace located beneath the conference room. Congratulations on your promotion, Appreciations...
This is a long walk to say I don't really know what the hell happened, because car combat was a genre that I never really cared for. Not because I have some long-standing beef dating back to the 90s, but because it just never interested me. It's always existed in the periphery. I played maybe 15 minutes of the original Twisted Metal on a classmate's PS1 which he brought to school, and it's funny to think back to that when Pokemon in all shapes and form was explicitly banned from campus. Beyond that, it's been a couple minutes here and there while testing ISO sets and demo discs over the year.
Two full hours with Twisted Metal Black is the most I've ever spent with one of these games in a single sitting, and I don't think I like it very much. True to the clip I linked, movement was my most immediate problem. Driving around feels fine, but getting your shots to line up is finicky, resulting in an over-reliance on homing missiles that often whiff against uneven terrain, which (while satisfying to get air off of) aren't conducive to getting a bead on your opponents. I frequently found myself the recipient of off-screen barrages that chewed through my health before I could flip a U-turn, and usually the attacking car would whizz by before I could line myself up to retaliate. Annoying.
After being assured by Larry that Black is just a hard game, I bumped the difficulty down and played a couple more levels only to find they still took an agonizing amount of time to clear and that I wasn't having much fun. Maye this is one of the worst Twisted Metal games, a series low point (it has a 3.5 average on here, so I'm guessing that's not the case), but I don't rightfully know because I've never given any of these much attention. I don't even know why I picked Black other than vague memories of it being billed at the time as a more mature Twisted Metal experience, one that had a bit of a harder edge. I like the cover, too.
I'm sure someone will tell me to play Vigilante 8 or I will "go in the contraption again," but guess what? I outfitted my 2003 Toyota Avalon with sidewinder missiles, and if you think I'm going back in there you got another thing co-- wait, the trigger isn't engaging oh NO
I decided to put together a committee to further investigate the demise of the genre, comprised of my friends Larry Davis, TransWitchSammy, and Appreciations. When asked what they thought of Twisted Metal and what contributed to the withering of the genre, the most interesting answer came from Appreciations, who posited that games like Grand Theft Auto III incorporated some staples of car combat into larger and more ambitious experiences, which further lessened the need for more bespoke vehicle-based brawling. Satisfied, I pressed two of the big red buttons on my console and dropped Larry and Sammy into a subterranean furnace located beneath the conference room. Congratulations on your promotion, Appreciations...
This is a long walk to say I don't really know what the hell happened, because car combat was a genre that I never really cared for. Not because I have some long-standing beef dating back to the 90s, but because it just never interested me. It's always existed in the periphery. I played maybe 15 minutes of the original Twisted Metal on a classmate's PS1 which he brought to school, and it's funny to think back to that when Pokemon in all shapes and form was explicitly banned from campus. Beyond that, it's been a couple minutes here and there while testing ISO sets and demo discs over the year.
Two full hours with Twisted Metal Black is the most I've ever spent with one of these games in a single sitting, and I don't think I like it very much. True to the clip I linked, movement was my most immediate problem. Driving around feels fine, but getting your shots to line up is finicky, resulting in an over-reliance on homing missiles that often whiff against uneven terrain, which (while satisfying to get air off of) aren't conducive to getting a bead on your opponents. I frequently found myself the recipient of off-screen barrages that chewed through my health before I could flip a U-turn, and usually the attacking car would whizz by before I could line myself up to retaliate. Annoying.
After being assured by Larry that Black is just a hard game, I bumped the difficulty down and played a couple more levels only to find they still took an agonizing amount of time to clear and that I wasn't having much fun. Maye this is one of the worst Twisted Metal games, a series low point (it has a 3.5 average on here, so I'm guessing that's not the case), but I don't rightfully know because I've never given any of these much attention. I don't even know why I picked Black other than vague memories of it being billed at the time as a more mature Twisted Metal experience, one that had a bit of a harder edge. I like the cover, too.
I'm sure someone will tell me to play Vigilante 8 or I will "go in the contraption again," but guess what? I outfitted my 2003 Toyota Avalon with sidewinder missiles, and if you think I'm going back in there you got another thing co-- wait, the trigger isn't engaging oh NO
Ive spent close to 6000 hours of my life on the 10 year Destiny project, with a hope (or maybe an increasingly morbid curiosity, I cant figure out which one it is) of where it could go. What profound thing would the Traveler have to say? What exotic societies and concepts reside in the bounds of the greater cosmos outside our little solar system? When it was all said and done, what exactly was the Final Shape going to be and what shape would we have to take to deny it? In the story of the three great nations and the three great queens, would it mean we would have to be the third queen?
And so I am beyond disgusted that the answer to where itll go is: nowhere. Nothing mattered. It was all just opium, just vapor and sawdust and pretty colors and shiny things, whatever it would take to mesmerize you for another year and for another $100. It fills me with rage, to have seen such fertile soil curdled into pigshit and tar. Art so negligent it should be criminal, work so poisonous it should be illegal. I am beyond hate for Destiny, and if theres any justice in the world itll become insolvent for Bungie and laid to rest, where its swollen husk can be pillaged by creatives who are actually worthy of its potential.
I say this only as a half joke, I think Destiny fans should be in prison. You let Bungie get away with it, you permit them at every opportunity with success for being unimaginative.
And so I am beyond disgusted that the answer to where itll go is: nowhere. Nothing mattered. It was all just opium, just vapor and sawdust and pretty colors and shiny things, whatever it would take to mesmerize you for another year and for another $100. It fills me with rage, to have seen such fertile soil curdled into pigshit and tar. Art so negligent it should be criminal, work so poisonous it should be illegal. I am beyond hate for Destiny, and if theres any justice in the world itll become insolvent for Bungie and laid to rest, where its swollen husk can be pillaged by creatives who are actually worthy of its potential.
I say this only as a half joke, I think Destiny fans should be in prison. You let Bungie get away with it, you permit them at every opportunity with success for being unimaginative.