lemonlimebeats
387 Reviews liked by lemonlimebeats
A toofpick changes everythang
"wot if u were a boy with no personality but two hot babes fell in love with you because you were nice to them on the most basic level possible and also the hot babes were part of a marginalised group considered your property but it's ok it's not weird we promise they actually like that you are Their Master it's ok :)"
You should all be ashamed of yourselves.
You should all be ashamed of yourselves.
Kill la Kill: If
2019
i bought this because I wanted easy access to a bunch of Ryuko Matoi voice lines for voice training because i am a parody of myself
what does it mean to "feel like Spider-Man"? after all, that's the refrain we heard time and time again upon the release of Spider-Man for the PS4, and it's the question that I couldn't get out of my head every time I thought about this game.
looking at the mechanics of the game doesn't really answer that question for me, mostly because a shocking amount of the experience of this game is simply lifted wholesale from the Batman Arkham games with precious little alteration. the combat, the surprisingly present stealth sections that involve isolating a group of enemies with a chronic neck injury that prevents them from looking even slightly Up, "detective" segments that entirely involve looking for a yellow line to follow, even an omnipresent voice in your ear feeding you constant info, it's all as it was all the way back in 2009's Arkham Asylum, mostly unaltered. indeed, these games themselves were lauded at the time for "making you feel like Batman" but not nearly to the same hyperbolic memetic extent as marvel's sony's kevin feige's ike perlmutter's spider-man does for the ultimate arachnid-boy. generally speaking I would not consider Spider-Man and Batman to be characters that share an enormous deal in common outside of the very basic concept of fighting criminals in an urban environment, and in many ways there is an argument to be made that spider-man is batman's antithesis. and yet, somehow, essentially the same mechanics that created an experience that made you Feel Like Batman has made a great many people Feel Like Spider-Man.
the one meaningful mechanic which differentiates this from Arkham (though, maybe not as much as it perhaps should given the zip-to-point mechanic is again lifted completely wholesale from Arkham City) is the web-swinging, and it's a useful point in elucidating what the mechanical experience of this game does. web-swinging in this game is pleasing, stunningly well-animated, highly responsive, and also completely effortless. it's a struggle to even call it a mechanic: it is almost completely on auto-pilot, with nothing more involved than successive presses of R2 seeing Miles swing, leap, run on walls, the navigational experience of Spider-Man swinging through a painfully detailed recreation of Manhattan reduced to a single button. much like Assassin's Creed's automated free-running that clearly inspired the rhythms of play here, web swinging in this game looks fantastic - especially on a twitter clip captured with the patented SonyTM PlayStationTM ShareTM ButtonTM - but mechanically vacuous to the point of non-existence.
comparisons to Spider-Man 2's (the 2004 game, not this, the second instalment of the Marvel's Spider-Man franchise, nor the upcoming Marvel's Spider-Man 2, the third game in the Marvel's Spider-Man franchise) much lauded web swinging are passé, I know, but indulge me for just a moment: web-swinging in that game was beloved because it was a system. It had depth, it had a skill ceiling, it had moves that were difficult to pull off and a learning curve that required familiarity with the mechanic. it was enough to make a game in and of itself, and indeed it largely did because the rest of Spider-Man 2 ranges from unremarkable to poor. i don't know if i would go as far to say that this system "made me feel like spider-man" but it was, at the very least, a systemisation of this aspect of the character in such a way that it made for a compelling gameplay experience.
spider-man PS4 has none of this. it's mechanics are intentionally stripped down to the point that essentially the entire game is about pressing buttons at the right time in response to on-screen stimuli, and I know all video games can be boiled down to that, but Marvel's Spider-Man comes pre-boiled: the illusion it creates is so wafer thin that even a minute of thought reveals the 4K smoke and mirrors for what they really are. contrary to the appeals to the fraught concept of immersion the phrase "makes you feel like spider-man" evokes, I've scarcely felt more painfully aware that I am a person sitting on a sofa, holding a controller, than when playing this. when your entire game is frictionless, there's nothing to hang onto, either.
there is one sense in which the gameplay experience of Marvel's Miles Morales succeeds in capturing the spirit of the character, and that's in how his new powers frequently dissolve tension in the gameplay, with his invisibility offering you a fast charging get-out-of-jail-free card if you mess up the stealth (if being the operative word here) and the way almost every fight will end with an overpowered Venom Blast.
indeed, Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales often does feel like a Spider-Man comic, but rarely in ways I enjoy. After tremendous backlash from vocal fans at the time to "The Night Gwen Stacy Died" issue of Spider-Man, Stan Lee (who at this point was increasingly disconnected from the actual goings-on of the universe he helped create to the point that he only knew Gwen was dead when someone at a con asked if she would come back to life) decreed that Marvel Comics should avoid meaningful change, change that might alienate longtime fans or, more importantly, those who wished to turn marvel characters into lunchboxes and action figures and cartoons and movies, and instead only offer the illusion of change. while the obvious response to this is that Peter Parker could only be replaced by his clone, Ben Reily, for a short period of time before the gravity of the status quo would pull Peter Parker back into the starring role, it also had something of a side-effect, which is that as a universe where meaningful change is resisted and avoided, Marvel Comics as a whole has a reactionary and conservative worldview that gravitates towards it's baked-in assumptions and the presumed goodness of those assumptions.
in 2004's Civil War, Marvel Comics sided with the PATRIOT act. In 2008's Secret Invasion, Marvel Comics used evil religious extremist shapeshifting Skrulls who hide among us and could be friends, co-workers, countrymen plotting the destruction of earth as an analogy for islamic terrorism. In 2012's Avengers VS X-Men, five heroes empowered by a cosmic force change the world for the better, curing diseases, ending world hunger, only to have those changes be rejected as unnatural, and eventually are consumed by said cosmic power. In 2019's House of X/Powers of X, the X-Men founded a nationalistic ethnostate for mutants that is an explicit parallel for the apartheid state of Israel and sees this as a good thing.
Whatever form it may take, whatever illusions of change may, however briefly, be affected, Marvel Comics are bound to a reflection of our status quo that is essentially desirable, and a huge amount of Superhero comics are about reinforcing their own status quos as well as our own, with high-profile stories such as DC's Doomsday Clock ultimately being nothing more than desperate appeals to the supposed self-evident relevance and importance of the unchanging status of these characters. All of this does not even mention the aggressive copaganda of the Marvel Cinematic Universe films, to the point where Captain Marvel was reproduced unaltered as propaganda for the US Air Force. Mainstream superheroes are always enforcers of the status quo, for good or for ill, but it's when the enforcement of that status quo comes up against depictions and discussions of the injustices of the real world that this becomes most uncomfortable.
There's a bit in this game, once you finish a side quest, where the camera pans up to a Black Lives Matter mural painted on the side of a building, and lingers there for just long enough to feel awkward. I don't object to the presence of this mural at all, but the direction decision here smacks as performative. It's not enough that the building is placed very prominently to ensure you can't miss it, but the game cranes itself to show you the image again, and the feeling of this can only really be described as the cinematography equivalent of "You know, I would have voted for Obama a third time if I could." It's desperate to demonstrate that it knows, it supports Black Lives Matter, but the functional reality of the rest of the game is aggressively at odds with what that movement is materially about.
I knew that the original 2018 Marvel's Spider-Man was in love with The Police but I can't describe how unprepared I still was for how aggressively conservative this game is. The story revolves around Miles Morales, while Peter Parker is on holiday to Generic Eastern Europeaistan, fighting against The Tinkerer and their evil plot to...destroy a product of an Evil Corporation that is giving people cancer. While at the eleventh hour they do contrive a reason why The Tinkerer's plan is #GoingTooFar, for most of the game there's actually no material reason for her to be in the wrong, and Miles Morales - and by extension, the game - is completely incapable of coming up with a single argument against her plan, simply resorting to "it's wrong! blowing things up is against the law!" or the classic "it's too risky! if even one person gets hurt that is too much!" said while Miles gives a Goon a severe concussion.
When I think of what Spider-Man means to me, what it is About, I think I'd describe it as the struggle to live up to an ideal of being our best selves, of always doing the right thing, in a world that makes that incredibly difficult to actually achieve, with our own personal failings and our endless conflicting responsibilities. In that sense, the Tinkerer, instrumentalized into meaningful action against an evil corporation by the death of a loved one, and struggling with how that affects her personal life and the relationships she has, is far more of a Spider-Man than Miles Morales in this game could ever be, given that his job is one of endless praise and assumed goodness facilitated by a hilarious uncritical depiction of the gig economy that sees the responsibility of Spider-Man morphed into a Deliveroo hustle grindset that always makes sure to respect Our Boys In Blue. How can something that loves the Police and hates direct action this much possibly claim to believe that Black Lives Matter?
In attempting to provide an "All-New, All-Different" up-to-date Spider-Man without making any effort to change the underlying assumptions it has about the world in which it lives, all this game does is expose how out of touch and outdated this whole concept is when the illusion of change fades away. Everything about this game is completely surface-level, all a well-presented illusion of Being Spider-Man that breaks the instant you think about it in any way, and you find yourself sitting your sofa, with your expensive toy for privileged people, pressing buttons to make the copaganda continue to play out in front of you.
I finished Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales. I had a perfectly ok time. I was rarely frustrated and occasionally found it charming and visually enthralling. I liked stuff with Miles' uncle. It also made me feel like everything about this style of game and this type of story had hit an evolutionary dead-end and had nowhere to go but running on the same treadmill, forever.
So, yes. It made me feel like Spider-ManTM.
looking at the mechanics of the game doesn't really answer that question for me, mostly because a shocking amount of the experience of this game is simply lifted wholesale from the Batman Arkham games with precious little alteration. the combat, the surprisingly present stealth sections that involve isolating a group of enemies with a chronic neck injury that prevents them from looking even slightly Up, "detective" segments that entirely involve looking for a yellow line to follow, even an omnipresent voice in your ear feeding you constant info, it's all as it was all the way back in 2009's Arkham Asylum, mostly unaltered. indeed, these games themselves were lauded at the time for "making you feel like Batman" but not nearly to the same hyperbolic memetic extent as marvel's sony's kevin feige's ike perlmutter's spider-man does for the ultimate arachnid-boy. generally speaking I would not consider Spider-Man and Batman to be characters that share an enormous deal in common outside of the very basic concept of fighting criminals in an urban environment, and in many ways there is an argument to be made that spider-man is batman's antithesis. and yet, somehow, essentially the same mechanics that created an experience that made you Feel Like Batman has made a great many people Feel Like Spider-Man.
the one meaningful mechanic which differentiates this from Arkham (though, maybe not as much as it perhaps should given the zip-to-point mechanic is again lifted completely wholesale from Arkham City) is the web-swinging, and it's a useful point in elucidating what the mechanical experience of this game does. web-swinging in this game is pleasing, stunningly well-animated, highly responsive, and also completely effortless. it's a struggle to even call it a mechanic: it is almost completely on auto-pilot, with nothing more involved than successive presses of R2 seeing Miles swing, leap, run on walls, the navigational experience of Spider-Man swinging through a painfully detailed recreation of Manhattan reduced to a single button. much like Assassin's Creed's automated free-running that clearly inspired the rhythms of play here, web swinging in this game looks fantastic - especially on a twitter clip captured with the patented SonyTM PlayStationTM ShareTM ButtonTM - but mechanically vacuous to the point of non-existence.
comparisons to Spider-Man 2's (the 2004 game, not this, the second instalment of the Marvel's Spider-Man franchise, nor the upcoming Marvel's Spider-Man 2, the third game in the Marvel's Spider-Man franchise) much lauded web swinging are passé, I know, but indulge me for just a moment: web-swinging in that game was beloved because it was a system. It had depth, it had a skill ceiling, it had moves that were difficult to pull off and a learning curve that required familiarity with the mechanic. it was enough to make a game in and of itself, and indeed it largely did because the rest of Spider-Man 2 ranges from unremarkable to poor. i don't know if i would go as far to say that this system "made me feel like spider-man" but it was, at the very least, a systemisation of this aspect of the character in such a way that it made for a compelling gameplay experience.
spider-man PS4 has none of this. it's mechanics are intentionally stripped down to the point that essentially the entire game is about pressing buttons at the right time in response to on-screen stimuli, and I know all video games can be boiled down to that, but Marvel's Spider-Man comes pre-boiled: the illusion it creates is so wafer thin that even a minute of thought reveals the 4K smoke and mirrors for what they really are. contrary to the appeals to the fraught concept of immersion the phrase "makes you feel like spider-man" evokes, I've scarcely felt more painfully aware that I am a person sitting on a sofa, holding a controller, than when playing this. when your entire game is frictionless, there's nothing to hang onto, either.
there is one sense in which the gameplay experience of Marvel's Miles Morales succeeds in capturing the spirit of the character, and that's in how his new powers frequently dissolve tension in the gameplay, with his invisibility offering you a fast charging get-out-of-jail-free card if you mess up the stealth (if being the operative word here) and the way almost every fight will end with an overpowered Venom Blast.
indeed, Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales often does feel like a Spider-Man comic, but rarely in ways I enjoy. After tremendous backlash from vocal fans at the time to "The Night Gwen Stacy Died" issue of Spider-Man, Stan Lee (who at this point was increasingly disconnected from the actual goings-on of the universe he helped create to the point that he only knew Gwen was dead when someone at a con asked if she would come back to life) decreed that Marvel Comics should avoid meaningful change, change that might alienate longtime fans or, more importantly, those who wished to turn marvel characters into lunchboxes and action figures and cartoons and movies, and instead only offer the illusion of change. while the obvious response to this is that Peter Parker could only be replaced by his clone, Ben Reily, for a short period of time before the gravity of the status quo would pull Peter Parker back into the starring role, it also had something of a side-effect, which is that as a universe where meaningful change is resisted and avoided, Marvel Comics as a whole has a reactionary and conservative worldview that gravitates towards it's baked-in assumptions and the presumed goodness of those assumptions.
in 2004's Civil War, Marvel Comics sided with the PATRIOT act. In 2008's Secret Invasion, Marvel Comics used evil religious extremist shapeshifting Skrulls who hide among us and could be friends, co-workers, countrymen plotting the destruction of earth as an analogy for islamic terrorism. In 2012's Avengers VS X-Men, five heroes empowered by a cosmic force change the world for the better, curing diseases, ending world hunger, only to have those changes be rejected as unnatural, and eventually are consumed by said cosmic power. In 2019's House of X/Powers of X, the X-Men founded a nationalistic ethnostate for mutants that is an explicit parallel for the apartheid state of Israel and sees this as a good thing.
Whatever form it may take, whatever illusions of change may, however briefly, be affected, Marvel Comics are bound to a reflection of our status quo that is essentially desirable, and a huge amount of Superhero comics are about reinforcing their own status quos as well as our own, with high-profile stories such as DC's Doomsday Clock ultimately being nothing more than desperate appeals to the supposed self-evident relevance and importance of the unchanging status of these characters. All of this does not even mention the aggressive copaganda of the Marvel Cinematic Universe films, to the point where Captain Marvel was reproduced unaltered as propaganda for the US Air Force. Mainstream superheroes are always enforcers of the status quo, for good or for ill, but it's when the enforcement of that status quo comes up against depictions and discussions of the injustices of the real world that this becomes most uncomfortable.
There's a bit in this game, once you finish a side quest, where the camera pans up to a Black Lives Matter mural painted on the side of a building, and lingers there for just long enough to feel awkward. I don't object to the presence of this mural at all, but the direction decision here smacks as performative. It's not enough that the building is placed very prominently to ensure you can't miss it, but the game cranes itself to show you the image again, and the feeling of this can only really be described as the cinematography equivalent of "You know, I would have voted for Obama a third time if I could." It's desperate to demonstrate that it knows, it supports Black Lives Matter, but the functional reality of the rest of the game is aggressively at odds with what that movement is materially about.
I knew that the original 2018 Marvel's Spider-Man was in love with The Police but I can't describe how unprepared I still was for how aggressively conservative this game is. The story revolves around Miles Morales, while Peter Parker is on holiday to Generic Eastern Europeaistan, fighting against The Tinkerer and their evil plot to...destroy a product of an Evil Corporation that is giving people cancer. While at the eleventh hour they do contrive a reason why The Tinkerer's plan is #GoingTooFar, for most of the game there's actually no material reason for her to be in the wrong, and Miles Morales - and by extension, the game - is completely incapable of coming up with a single argument against her plan, simply resorting to "it's wrong! blowing things up is against the law!" or the classic "it's too risky! if even one person gets hurt that is too much!" said while Miles gives a Goon a severe concussion.
When I think of what Spider-Man means to me, what it is About, I think I'd describe it as the struggle to live up to an ideal of being our best selves, of always doing the right thing, in a world that makes that incredibly difficult to actually achieve, with our own personal failings and our endless conflicting responsibilities. In that sense, the Tinkerer, instrumentalized into meaningful action against an evil corporation by the death of a loved one, and struggling with how that affects her personal life and the relationships she has, is far more of a Spider-Man than Miles Morales in this game could ever be, given that his job is one of endless praise and assumed goodness facilitated by a hilarious uncritical depiction of the gig economy that sees the responsibility of Spider-Man morphed into a Deliveroo hustle grindset that always makes sure to respect Our Boys In Blue. How can something that loves the Police and hates direct action this much possibly claim to believe that Black Lives Matter?
In attempting to provide an "All-New, All-Different" up-to-date Spider-Man without making any effort to change the underlying assumptions it has about the world in which it lives, all this game does is expose how out of touch and outdated this whole concept is when the illusion of change fades away. Everything about this game is completely surface-level, all a well-presented illusion of Being Spider-Man that breaks the instant you think about it in any way, and you find yourself sitting your sofa, with your expensive toy for privileged people, pressing buttons to make the copaganda continue to play out in front of you.
I finished Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales. I had a perfectly ok time. I was rarely frustrated and occasionally found it charming and visually enthralling. I liked stuff with Miles' uncle. It also made me feel like everything about this style of game and this type of story had hit an evolutionary dead-end and had nowhere to go but running on the same treadmill, forever.
So, yes. It made me feel like Spider-ManTM.
Chrono Cross
1999
Xenoblade rip-off
Um Jammer Lammy
1999
lammy gotta be like in the top 5 best women in history of women
P.T.
2014
Crazy to think one of the most important and influential horror games of all time was just a demo.
P.T.
2014
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P.T.
2014
my hard drive gets more valuable with each passing day
P.T.
2014
does anyone know when this will come to switch
This shit is so poorly optimized that it almost loads images slower than Backloggd loads pages.
Not really that bad just super mediocre and p boring tbh. I am not the target audience for this at all and thats fine, but I feel like it just got super boring especially in the later game that feels extremely padded out despite this being only 7-8 hours long.
Ig its cute and fun for a bit, just not much else going for it tbh, idk maybe I am just a soulless mf but I p much only finished it cuz it was short (a blessing in disguise, I would not have finished this otherwise)
the performance is very bad tho holy shit how are we in 2024 and switch games are still running at 20fps, this game isnt even visually impressive tf are they doing at goodfeel LMAO
so yeah, dont hate it, just something I found boring and will never go back to, feel peach deserves something better, at least its charming tho!
also 100% experience is absolutely miserable and i will never do it, why nintendo simply REFUSES to let us collect something in a stage and then quit out to save it in our lords year 2024 is fucking insane, especially since you are STILL forced to follow the games pace on replays of a stage
Ig its cute and fun for a bit, just not much else going for it tbh, idk maybe I am just a soulless mf but I p much only finished it cuz it was short (a blessing in disguise, I would not have finished this otherwise)
the performance is very bad tho holy shit how are we in 2024 and switch games are still running at 20fps, this game isnt even visually impressive tf are they doing at goodfeel LMAO
so yeah, dont hate it, just something I found boring and will never go back to, feel peach deserves something better, at least its charming tho!
also 100% experience is absolutely miserable and i will never do it, why nintendo simply REFUSES to let us collect something in a stage and then quit out to save it in our lords year 2024 is fucking insane, especially since you are STILL forced to follow the games pace on replays of a stage
When you’re a young kid in the 00s who hasn’t quite figured out that you’re trans yet, there’s certain pieces of media you fixate on. Things that give you Feelings that you don’t fully understand or know how to explain. This is particularly weird with media that is created by people that are absolutely not trying to create a trans message and would probably spit on in your face if you implied they were. Polyjuice potions in Harry Potter, the entirety of Ranma, and, of course, the "Boy Who Would Be Queen" episode of Fairly OddParents.
There's a bizarre nature to these kinds of projects. The creators are so single minded in their idea of how things are "supposed" to be and so consistent in using things they consider "wrong" as a cheap gag, it kind of swerves back around to give some kids (or least me) some young gender euphoria. A lot of FOP falls under this umbrella, but The Boy Who Would Be Queen episode toys with some interesting attempts at examining the idea of gender. Timmy is magically transformed to become "Timantha" to understand his crush, and discovers how his tastes haven't really changed as a girl. He still likes soap operas and comics, but now he's supposed to be ashamed of the latter rather than the former. He discovers his crush falls into the same problem. Trixie likes comics and video games but feels the pressure of society forcing her to fill the traditional gender roles. The prison of gender hurts all parties involved. What's particularly easy to read as queer in the episode is how both Timmy and Trixie are presenting themselves. Timmy's obviously dressed as Timantha, but Trixie is also trying to pass as a boy. In these disguises, these two can express genuine, vulnerable feelings to each other that they will never express in the rest of the show. Trixie tells Timantha, a girl she's known for just a few hours, like a normal straight girl would, "If only you were a boy, then I'd date you for sure." The gag is obviously supposed to be that Timmy's crush is still out of reach, but its so on the nose its hard not to read into it. To a young 10 year old who was just lectured and ostracized for agreeing with the girls that "girls are better than boys", this episode sent a chill up my spine. And I wasn't the only one. If you dive into fanfiction communities, you'll find more than a few stories that center around Timmy choosing to permanently stay as Timantha so that Trixie can have a real "friend."
Much of Breakin' Da Rules rehashes various plots from the early FOP canon. Timmy becomes a dog. Timmy becomes microscopic. Timmy fights aliens. Timmy and friends trapped in a video game. And, of course, Timmy becomes Timantha.
There was a time in my life where I would focus in on that ten minute segment where you're Timantha, trying to ignore the "could this GET any more silly?" quips. Begging for something more, I would spin elaborate narratives in my mind where this segment could go on forever. I never finished the game proper, that segment was all I needed.
Now I'm an adult and I can do two things:
1. Mod the game to add the Timantha face onto Timmy full time, which I sat down and learned how to do.
2. Understand how deeply bad this game is past that ten minute segment.
There's certainly ambition here. When you crack into a game's files, you get a greater understanding of just how much work went into the game. There's dozens of different models that Timmy plays as throughout the game. Timantha, Dog Timmy, Superhero Timmy, Robin Hood Timmy, Greek Toga Timmy, and so on and so forth. Modding the game required me to manually change the eyes of every single one of these models. The levels themselves clearly built a lot of assets. Each level has a different gimmick, sometimes multiple gimmicks. The time travel level required a bunch of different textures and assets built for all three of the time periods you travel to. I can certainly respect how much effort went into that.
But its hard not to compare this to its successor Shadow Showdown. The other FOP focuses in on the fantastical and allows the developers to build huge, elaborate levels with bizarre mechanics and designs. Breakin' Da Rules sticks with the human world and the established FOP episodes, to its detriment. The level centered around Timmy's neighborhood is empty and miserable, its almost haunting. It doesn't feel lonely in Shadow Showdown when you're journeying through someone's dream or investigating a spooky mansion. It would be easy to call this a beta for Shadow Showdown until you look at all the same files I did. If they centered in on developing Timmy's central model and mechanics, even if it meant losing my girl Timantha, the game might at least feel alright to play. But they had to program all the ways these different models had to move and it clearly bogged the game down. The actual art decision and level design are messy, but at least that can be something I know they learned from moving forward. The mechanics themselves are similarly flawed. Each level requires collecting five stars for a wish, which typically involves "press this button to progress" with no change to the actual gameplay. The game operates on the life system, which most platformers had moved past already. Losing all your lives get punted past to the last save point, which forces you to repeat tedious and dull levels just to reach whatever stupid thing trapped you for so long. You just get the sense this game suffered from poor direction even beyond being an underfunded licensed game in the 00s. Its a real shame but its tempered with the face that the sequel is so much better.
And also, I learned to mod shit in the pursuit of fulfilling some childhood dreams, so I gotta give that to it.
There's a bizarre nature to these kinds of projects. The creators are so single minded in their idea of how things are "supposed" to be and so consistent in using things they consider "wrong" as a cheap gag, it kind of swerves back around to give some kids (or least me) some young gender euphoria. A lot of FOP falls under this umbrella, but The Boy Who Would Be Queen episode toys with some interesting attempts at examining the idea of gender. Timmy is magically transformed to become "Timantha" to understand his crush, and discovers how his tastes haven't really changed as a girl. He still likes soap operas and comics, but now he's supposed to be ashamed of the latter rather than the former. He discovers his crush falls into the same problem. Trixie likes comics and video games but feels the pressure of society forcing her to fill the traditional gender roles. The prison of gender hurts all parties involved. What's particularly easy to read as queer in the episode is how both Timmy and Trixie are presenting themselves. Timmy's obviously dressed as Timantha, but Trixie is also trying to pass as a boy. In these disguises, these two can express genuine, vulnerable feelings to each other that they will never express in the rest of the show. Trixie tells Timantha, a girl she's known for just a few hours, like a normal straight girl would, "If only you were a boy, then I'd date you for sure." The gag is obviously supposed to be that Timmy's crush is still out of reach, but its so on the nose its hard not to read into it. To a young 10 year old who was just lectured and ostracized for agreeing with the girls that "girls are better than boys", this episode sent a chill up my spine. And I wasn't the only one. If you dive into fanfiction communities, you'll find more than a few stories that center around Timmy choosing to permanently stay as Timantha so that Trixie can have a real "friend."
Much of Breakin' Da Rules rehashes various plots from the early FOP canon. Timmy becomes a dog. Timmy becomes microscopic. Timmy fights aliens. Timmy and friends trapped in a video game. And, of course, Timmy becomes Timantha.
There was a time in my life where I would focus in on that ten minute segment where you're Timantha, trying to ignore the "could this GET any more silly?" quips. Begging for something more, I would spin elaborate narratives in my mind where this segment could go on forever. I never finished the game proper, that segment was all I needed.
Now I'm an adult and I can do two things:
1. Mod the game to add the Timantha face onto Timmy full time, which I sat down and learned how to do.
2. Understand how deeply bad this game is past that ten minute segment.
There's certainly ambition here. When you crack into a game's files, you get a greater understanding of just how much work went into the game. There's dozens of different models that Timmy plays as throughout the game. Timantha, Dog Timmy, Superhero Timmy, Robin Hood Timmy, Greek Toga Timmy, and so on and so forth. Modding the game required me to manually change the eyes of every single one of these models. The levels themselves clearly built a lot of assets. Each level has a different gimmick, sometimes multiple gimmicks. The time travel level required a bunch of different textures and assets built for all three of the time periods you travel to. I can certainly respect how much effort went into that.
But its hard not to compare this to its successor Shadow Showdown. The other FOP focuses in on the fantastical and allows the developers to build huge, elaborate levels with bizarre mechanics and designs. Breakin' Da Rules sticks with the human world and the established FOP episodes, to its detriment. The level centered around Timmy's neighborhood is empty and miserable, its almost haunting. It doesn't feel lonely in Shadow Showdown when you're journeying through someone's dream or investigating a spooky mansion. It would be easy to call this a beta for Shadow Showdown until you look at all the same files I did. If they centered in on developing Timmy's central model and mechanics, even if it meant losing my girl Timantha, the game might at least feel alright to play. But they had to program all the ways these different models had to move and it clearly bogged the game down. The actual art decision and level design are messy, but at least that can be something I know they learned from moving forward. The mechanics themselves are similarly flawed. Each level requires collecting five stars for a wish, which typically involves "press this button to progress" with no change to the actual gameplay. The game operates on the life system, which most platformers had moved past already. Losing all your lives get punted past to the last save point, which forces you to repeat tedious and dull levels just to reach whatever stupid thing trapped you for so long. You just get the sense this game suffered from poor direction even beyond being an underfunded licensed game in the 00s. Its a real shame but its tempered with the face that the sequel is so much better.
And also, I learned to mod shit in the pursuit of fulfilling some childhood dreams, so I gotta give that to it.
This game presents a lot of interesting and great ideas, but they're all hidden behind hours and hours and hours of tedious tests of patience. A Link to the Past is largely held back by a lack of modern conveniences, as well as general lack of direction. I think this game is great for children who have countless hours to spend walking around and exploring Hyrule, but as someone who has played any Zelda game that came out after this, it is a slog to get through. The dungeons are generally annoying to sift through, the Dark World is boring and annoying to traverse, the Light World is effectively a giant time waster once you finish three dungeons. There are only a couple of good dungeons in the game, and unfortunately they're the last ones and are still ridden with various issues the other dungeons (and the rest of the game) contain. I think the good ideas this game presents are done far better in later titles, so I really recommend only playing this if you want to play every Zelda game or if you haven't played one yet and want to see what all the hubbub is about.
A Link to the Past. A monolith of the Zelda franchise, alongside Ocarina of Time, that simultaneously solidified the series formula and set its subsequent sequels on a path that would take 26 years to break free from. Nowadays a divisive title between the fanbase, its reputation for turning the series into a restrictive, hand holding, linear affair is mostly undeserved and severly exagerated. While lacking the first screen statement of the original Legend of Zelda and guiding you through a small set of introductory dungeons with little deviation before opening itself up, ALttP still retains the exploration DNA from its predecessors.
Allowing for a surprising amount of choice in how you tackle its questline provides numerous fun guideless discoveries such as the Zora waterfall or the warp travel bird, and without the intrusive tutorialization and puzzle signalling that would later on plague the franchise, players are left to their own devices to figure out dungeon entry enigmas and solve meticulously puzzle box designed dungeons that do not hold any punches in their mental and physical challenge. In what I consider a brilliant decision, in order to be able to defeat the final boss after a gauntlet of the hardest rooms in the game, you need to have had completed a series of side quests that you would think were just optional content, a devious trick that would make the NES games proud.
Having said that, I unfortunately do tend to agree with most of the critical reevaluation that ALttP has recently gotten from its detractors. While the colorful and detailed Super Nintendo presentation lends a newly found personality to the series, it also ends up removing much of the alluring mystery and mystique of its more simple and abstract looking prequels. The more perceptible aesthetic is itself a double edged sword that easily signals what you are allowed to engage with and what is noise to be ignored, a harmless consequence of technology advancement that ironically ends up reducing the scope of ALttP's map, despite how much bigger it is than Zelda 1 and 2. It's true that ALttP allows room for the player to decide which path he wants to take, but that certainly becomes a harder decision to make when you can just open your map at any time and realize you are going the wrong way.
Make no mistake in assuming I am implying that A Link to the Past forever strayed the Zelda franchise away from its strength and potential, as that's not the point I'm trying to make. But it's hard to deny that the series philosophy took a turn here, in the same manner that something like DMC3 would forever rob the franchise of another DMC1 happening. And maybe it was for the best, as moments like finally being able to pick up the Master Sword in the middle of a shady forest represent some of the most awe-inspiring and affecting iconography the series offered. The true mark of A Link to the Past's success is in the ability of the franchise to ride on its coattails for almost 30 years.
Allowing for a surprising amount of choice in how you tackle its questline provides numerous fun guideless discoveries such as the Zora waterfall or the warp travel bird, and without the intrusive tutorialization and puzzle signalling that would later on plague the franchise, players are left to their own devices to figure out dungeon entry enigmas and solve meticulously puzzle box designed dungeons that do not hold any punches in their mental and physical challenge. In what I consider a brilliant decision, in order to be able to defeat the final boss after a gauntlet of the hardest rooms in the game, you need to have had completed a series of side quests that you would think were just optional content, a devious trick that would make the NES games proud.
Having said that, I unfortunately do tend to agree with most of the critical reevaluation that ALttP has recently gotten from its detractors. While the colorful and detailed Super Nintendo presentation lends a newly found personality to the series, it also ends up removing much of the alluring mystery and mystique of its more simple and abstract looking prequels. The more perceptible aesthetic is itself a double edged sword that easily signals what you are allowed to engage with and what is noise to be ignored, a harmless consequence of technology advancement that ironically ends up reducing the scope of ALttP's map, despite how much bigger it is than Zelda 1 and 2. It's true that ALttP allows room for the player to decide which path he wants to take, but that certainly becomes a harder decision to make when you can just open your map at any time and realize you are going the wrong way.
Make no mistake in assuming I am implying that A Link to the Past forever strayed the Zelda franchise away from its strength and potential, as that's not the point I'm trying to make. But it's hard to deny that the series philosophy took a turn here, in the same manner that something like DMC3 would forever rob the franchise of another DMC1 happening. And maybe it was for the best, as moments like finally being able to pick up the Master Sword in the middle of a shady forest represent some of the most awe-inspiring and affecting iconography the series offered. The true mark of A Link to the Past's success is in the ability of the franchise to ride on its coattails for almost 30 years.