How do you tell a story about the dilemma of adoptive and biological family? Easy! Just let the player escape from all their problems, and give them a pat in the back. Because everyone will receive you with open arms after you betrayed their love. Everyone will accept your shitty decisions as if nothing had happened, and in fact the game will congratulate you for running away, because doing so is THE ZOMG TRUE GOLDEN ENDING!

But the world doesn't work that way. Your decisions have consequences. People get hurt. It's not the fault of some weird invisible dragon that conspires against your universe.

And the worst part, Intelligent Systems, is that you didn't do it because you believe in neutrality or equality. You did so because you wanted the player to bang everyone. You wanted the player to feel cool.

Intelligent Systems, do you remember when Marth had to put a face to his people to hide the pain he felt for the loss of his family? When Alm cried after he realized what he had done to his father? When Seliph and Leif went through a holy war to restore the tainted name of their families? Do you remember when there were heroes and being responsible to your family mattered?

People have complained about this game, about its garbage level design, about its story worthy of a fanfiction, but never at the contempt of its heart. And people have also defended this game, because "yooo, psycho, story doesn't matter in Fire Emblem". Okay, if you think that what you're watching on screen is acceptable and can be ignored, if you want to be complicit, you do you.

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

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

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

This is the most opprobious game of the year. Desperate for attention, this visual novel lives and dies by a single evident gimmick, which is to shock the player with anime girls and a dating sim facade to reveal later a profane horror game, like a creepypasta. This shallow premise's effectiveness is destroyed by the game's own writing, since the script attempts to subvert harem anime clichés by adding more anime stereotypes, most prominently the yandere trope and an incessant amount of androcentrism by portraying girls unable to contain their attraction to a guy - this is handled as insultingly as it sounds, since the villain is a girl who mauls her rivals in order to be alone with you forever and be on an eternal date. In addition to that, Doki Doki Literature Club adds fourth-wall breaking such as glitching out the game, messing with the files, expecting the player to clear the game multiple times for the good ending and adding "creepy images and text files" to your disk drive as its pretense to horror, but on an age where meta narrative is a trend among trashy self-referential indie hits (Undertale, Pony Island, Luna Game), the game keeps falling on trends and becoming predictable, turning the experience into merely seeing what is going to be the next trick on the checklist now that the true face of the game is unveiled. How is a game that attempts to surprise going to even achieve this purpose if its own writing and design is completely counterproductive? Bonus points for throwing a warning of disturbing content at the start, defeating the whole purpose of the game.

The game's apologists might argue that it's a parody, but the game's endings suggest that the story is supposed to be taken seriously. Some might argue that it's a portrayal of depression, but its horror elements end up making the issue more insensitive towards it under this perspective. At the end of the day, Doki Doki Literature Club is a game about nothing and without a single original idea. Even peruvian horror B movies have more dignity than this crappypasta.

This is better than I remembered. Everything is right in its place. Disregarding the obvious inherited aspects of the original (lack of a map, floating jump mechanics, only having one type of weapon at a time) that work just as well here, the changes reshape the meaning of the experience. The close camera to represent a dark cavern where watching ahead is difficult, the repeated tiles to simulate the feeling of getting lost the more one enters into labyrinthine places, and the black-and-white coloration that strengthens the limited vision. In a sense, you can interpret these elements as the developer's way to put the player in Samus's perspective, and they help as well to give thrill to the anticipation of an encounter. Even if the game is linear, it's easy to stop having track on where to go if you don't pay attention, and even if the game has some modern conventions such as save points and healing spots, it's not nearly as bad as modern works because they're hidden, more dispersed across the world, and require effort to get there. So even if the game isn't as radical as its predecessor, the modern conventions it applies aren't nearly as disruptive to the experience as later games.
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The only real major drawback however are the Metroids themselves. They are fittingly aggressive and non-deterministic in their behavior, which contributes to close, even personal brawls, but their lack of solid damage output in combination to the game's floating physics allowing maneuvering over them made them non-threatening, and the fear of facing them diminishes once the player realizes that merely staying healthy for the fight suffices to engage them. It's an exploit in the design, but one that doesn't make the experience of facing them ring false.

The most beautiful aspect of the game for me however is in the little spaces that Samus can enter. Paths in the ground that lead nowhere, but exist as an extension of the landscape. These places, which have no purpose, are representative of the developer's intent to create a wild planet, a place not built for the player but to be an habitat to its fauna. Or edifications in ruins, abandoned long ago that tell the history of the planet with just their existence. And the feeling you get by navigating through them is to be in virgin soil, untouched by human hands, even sacred, through mere abstraction. And this feeling, unique in any game I have seen, is why Return of Samus is one of the vital games of 1991.

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

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

So, you're God. No work-arounds, you're simply God, and you take care of your people and your creation. People go to the temple to revere you and give you offerings that help you. People's faith strengthens you.

At the end of the game, once you're finished with your work and have defeated evil, people stop visiting temples. Why? Because they don't need you anymore. The game reveals itself as a bitter allegory of people's relationship with religion, a very common theme in Quintet's games in the 90s.

ActRaiser utilizes God simulation mechanics to make the player a direct participant in creation to form a bond to the people that have faith in you and make the finale more resonant.

This was the first game that made me cry back as a kid because of the ending, and used to be my favorite game for many years. In fact this was the game that cemented me as a videogame fan.

I'm saying this because playing it nowadays feels weird. Unbalanced, ultra-decisive leveling system that discourages intelligent play, some barely designed dungeons and nonsensical characterization plague this game. The game is about appreciating the process of creation to make a commentary on the conflict between nature, spirituality and modernity, yet it doesn't evoke any reaction other than contemplating how pretty the game looks like. Why did Quintet make this a JRPG? Fuckin' Enix, you don't have to infect everything with Dragon-Quest-itis. It's lame because you can see the ideas right there: You're the active participant in the process of creation, and life flourishes, society is tainted by the loss of respect towards nature and spiritual values, and the overworld is our Earth.

At the end of the game you defeat Ragnara, which is pretty much the devil. And then you're going to disappear, but Divina (God) gives you the chance to spend your last day with your loved ones because hey, let's make the most of what is left from life, even if I don't have much due to some weird clinical condition, but let's be grateful for what God has already gifted me. Control is returned to you, and you have the best day of your life, you hug your mum and your best friend whom you adore, thank you Melina for always being there for me even at my lowest, I love you. You can play around, greet your neighbors. However it will have to be over. You look at the pond to think about the future, but there's no reflection. You can't live forever, and once you're sure you have done everything you wanted and accept that it's really over, you can lay off in your deathbed and have your final dream. You dream of being a seagull, the first being you ever encountered that could travel between continents, because flight is freedom in this game. You fly, free of the shackles of this world towards the sky, and look back and think about the creation you have helped bring forth in your final dream while the music insists on keeping on and you feel your life fading away, and it's this moment that you realize that you can finally be happy, because you know that having lived has been worth it.

I'm still alive two decades later though. Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two design decisions contribute to this game's success:
- The block quota the player needs to fulfill to win the duel, which prevents stalling.
- Multiple groups of matching blocks affecting the speed of which the opponent's blocks start rolling down.

These two factors encourage the player to concatenate matching blocks in as few actions as possible. The key word here: Efficiency.

However, blocks rolling down threaten the player with a defeat, thus creating urgency to destroy blocks near the bottom. Urgency and efficiency clash with each other. It's a choice, except it's not just once, but multiple times per second, many steps ahead, while you desperately move your avatar to grab and throw blocks, and possibly mess up in the process. Then you blink once and your opponent is done with you.

Add to the mix different attack patterns according to each character for another layer of strategy. One of them pierces with multiple blocks at once on the center, another one spreads them evenly to overwhelm the opponent, and so on. It's all up to playstyle.

"First art game" is enough to scoff at. I honestly don't really care if games are labeled as art or not. I only know that there are games that do their work better than others. So naturally, I approached Alien Garden with skepticism.

So, in this game you play as an extraterrestrial life form that has to survive. You have no clue on what does you right, what harms you, since it's randomized. The imagery is unclear, black-and-white, nothing familiar to recognize patterns. So what do you do then? You just try until you can figure yourself and the world out.

It's then that I realized that this was pretty much life in a nutshell.

I made a video on the game on YouTube (original language in Spanish, but I put subtitles): https://youtu.be/qcy-0bOY_No

Gris fails as an architectonic construct because as much as its imagery suggests beauty, the interaction with the world is empty. The details that are visually presented don't exist to the gameplay, creating a sensorial dissonance. Travelling through the landscape suggests going through stairs or small bumps of road, but the real input is pressing left and right, like if everything was flat. Gris fails as a platformer because there's no grace to the gravitational movement, no punishment for jumping wrong, no enrichment to use platforming for exploration. If you miss, you'll simply fall over and try again until you get it. Its only purpose is to trick the player that they're doing something while advancing and clearing puzzles and collectibles in order to justify that it's a game. It's so simple-minded that one wonders why it's there. It is inept as a statement about overcoming depression because of its vagueness: Instead of telling a personal viewpoint, the game uses its theme as an excuse for abstract imagery to elevate its tone to solemnity and sell itself as an artistic experience.

One just needs to compare it to other platformers that deal with the same topic to realize its lack of insight: Liz Ryerson's Problem Attic subverts rules constantly alongside a glitch aesthetic where bounds are unclear to exteriorize physical and mental prisons of people unhappy with their own identity (most specifically gender dysphoria). GAMBIT Game Lab's Elude uses its periodically weakening controls to materialize through physics the feeling of being pulled down by depression, when things that used to make you happy are no longer working, and the effort that's needed to get out of the mental abyss. Patchwork Doll's Rock Bottom sets itself into the bottom of a pit where you can't escape until you've experienced failure enough times by making death a puzzle as well as the source of an upgrade in the jump height, creating a sense of liberation after hardships. That no matter how many times you fail, there's always a way out. Even if the comparison was made with a game that I don't consider good, such as Maddy Thorson's Celeste, Gris pales is comparison as even if Celeste reveals a victimizing attitude, the game is more honest and has a purpose by using the metaphor of climbing a mountain and facing your internal demons in your path as a manifestation of overcoming mental problems. Gris's portrayal of overcoming depression is a soft experience that is distanced from the clinical condition, and is closer to romantization, without the pain behind. Setting aside how insulting it is to capitalize on sentimental appeal, the end result is that there's no statement, nothing that the game attempts, and thus, there's nothing accomplished. The game's seriousness only leads to a masquerade, as it's hollow inside.

Right now (December 2018), Gris has an 84 in Metacritic. This is art, gamers claim. No wonder why videogames are the laughing stock among other disciplines; why taking games as art is a meme. Veneer is what we ask from videogames after all, and I wonder if this is everything that there's to the future of this medium. Back in 1995, Shigeru Miyamoto reportedly said when talking about Donkey Kong Country that players will put up with mediocre gameplay as long as the "art" is good. More than twenty years later, Gris proves that such a statement still rings true.

(Edited the creator of Celeste's name on 29/09/2022)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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