mothpile
4 reviews liked by mothpile
This is maybe the biggest “this would be great if it was good!” game I’ve ever played. I absolutely loved Billy Hatcher but it is just a kind of middling platformer that makes the wild choice of pushing its worst levels at you first, therefore only reaching its height of “kinda fun!” halfway through, before ending with a stupidly bad final boss.
I think I’m just one of the few people who really would get as much joy from this game as I did, as frustrating as that is for me to say. Its graphics and character design and GBA link cable support add up to something that is so incredibly up my alley I became kind of obsessed! But if you just aren’t that interested in seeing kinda cute GameCube graphics animals pop out of colorful eggs then there is absolutely nothing else in the game to hook you. And its biggest flaws wouldn’t even be that hard to fix, either! I think polishing up the final boss and removing the lives system would instantly make the game leaps and bounds better.
I think if you do have some sort of interest in playing this game, whatever the reason is, it is worth trying. If you play it on emulator and don’t mind abusing save states then doubly so. I really, really hope a remake comes out someday that is more easily recommendable to more people but as is it’s still a game I enjoyed a lot.
I think I’m just one of the few people who really would get as much joy from this game as I did, as frustrating as that is for me to say. Its graphics and character design and GBA link cable support add up to something that is so incredibly up my alley I became kind of obsessed! But if you just aren’t that interested in seeing kinda cute GameCube graphics animals pop out of colorful eggs then there is absolutely nothing else in the game to hook you. And its biggest flaws wouldn’t even be that hard to fix, either! I think polishing up the final boss and removing the lives system would instantly make the game leaps and bounds better.
I think if you do have some sort of interest in playing this game, whatever the reason is, it is worth trying. If you play it on emulator and don’t mind abusing save states then doubly so. I really, really hope a remake comes out someday that is more easily recommendable to more people but as is it’s still a game I enjoyed a lot.
I Spy Treasure Hunt
2001
As a fan of hidden object/picture riddle games (both digital and physical) I know how hard they are to discuss. As a game, there's almost nothing to say about Treasure Hunt. It's part of genre made for very young kids with little to no gaming or computer experience.
But whats noticeable about Treasure Hunt, and the I Spy series as a whole is how beautiful each scene is. Created with physical objects and real lighting by Walter Wick, the detail and charm of each scene is unique to his work. As a child I spent a lot of time playing hidden objects games made entirely through stock digital images, and while there is a charm to those games I Spy sits so far above them.
And then, even amongst the rest of the I Spy series, Treasure Hunt manages to stick out. While other games in the series would sort of "elaborate" on scenes from the books, Treasure Hunt takes this idea further and better.
As a "story" about a Treasure Hunt, the scenes and locations of the book was already immensely charming. You start of with "Arrival", a view of the train station you just took here to this small town. You get a view from the Inn your staying in. Each scene has you moving through this small town, seeing it's sights and searching for the treasure. And what I love so so much above the video game Treasure Hunt is how it turns the small town into Smugglers Cove.
Though you did get to see the name Smugglers Cove in the book (if you looked for it), the game makes you much more aware of it. You get the feeling of actually being there, seeing the interior of the train station you only walked out of in the book. You see the interior of Duck Pond Inn, the ice cream shop, a museum of the towns history. The over world allows you to move from place to place, see where one place connects to another. You get to ride a boat to No-Man's-Island, get to look into the well that previously had treasure in the book.
It's such a beautiful way to expand on the book, to make you feel like you are truly present in a fictional town made up for children. It's an attention to detail I love. Smugglers Cove feels like a place that I want to go, a place I have fond memories of. I Spy Treasure Hunt sits as the peak of the series, in both games and books.
But whats noticeable about Treasure Hunt, and the I Spy series as a whole is how beautiful each scene is. Created with physical objects and real lighting by Walter Wick, the detail and charm of each scene is unique to his work. As a child I spent a lot of time playing hidden objects games made entirely through stock digital images, and while there is a charm to those games I Spy sits so far above them.
And then, even amongst the rest of the I Spy series, Treasure Hunt manages to stick out. While other games in the series would sort of "elaborate" on scenes from the books, Treasure Hunt takes this idea further and better.
As a "story" about a Treasure Hunt, the scenes and locations of the book was already immensely charming. You start of with "Arrival", a view of the train station you just took here to this small town. You get a view from the Inn your staying in. Each scene has you moving through this small town, seeing it's sights and searching for the treasure. And what I love so so much above the video game Treasure Hunt is how it turns the small town into Smugglers Cove.
Though you did get to see the name Smugglers Cove in the book (if you looked for it), the game makes you much more aware of it. You get the feeling of actually being there, seeing the interior of the train station you only walked out of in the book. You see the interior of Duck Pond Inn, the ice cream shop, a museum of the towns history. The over world allows you to move from place to place, see where one place connects to another. You get to ride a boat to No-Man's-Island, get to look into the well that previously had treasure in the book.
It's such a beautiful way to expand on the book, to make you feel like you are truly present in a fictional town made up for children. It's an attention to detail I love. Smugglers Cove feels like a place that I want to go, a place I have fond memories of. I Spy Treasure Hunt sits as the peak of the series, in both games and books.
I haven’t played the original, so I’m no expert on what changes were made to the game, but I really wish more quality-of-life options were added. I had constant frustrations throughout the game involving repeating the same things over and over again. If I save and close the game during a puzzle I’m struggling with, I have to watch all of the dialogue crawl by, then move myself into position (often having to wait for objects to move an inch), skip through more hint dialogue, wait for other characters to move into place, and then finally I’ll get to actually attempt the puzzle I left myself on. I think that basically all of these hiccups would’ve been solved by adding a rewind, fast forward, and save state feature similar to what you would get playing the original in an emulator.
There's also several minor graphical audio issues, none of them ruined the game but it was extremely annoying that the “borderless window” setting just didn’t work properly for me, and for some reason if I tabbed out of the game my PC would try to switch audio devices. My only other complaint is just that some of the puzzles could’ve used a bit more tuning and they could’ve made it clearer when you can/cannot swap between objects while other things were in motion. All of these are very minor problems, and some could’ve also been made better by my imagined rewind feature.
The game is still very fun, I’m extremely glad I got to play it and see it remade like this. I'd highly recommend giving it a try.
There's also several minor graphical audio issues, none of them ruined the game but it was extremely annoying that the “borderless window” setting just didn’t work properly for me, and for some reason if I tabbed out of the game my PC would try to switch audio devices. My only other complaint is just that some of the puzzles could’ve used a bit more tuning and they could’ve made it clearer when you can/cannot swap between objects while other things were in motion. All of these are very minor problems, and some could’ve also been made better by my imagined rewind feature.
The game is still very fun, I’m extremely glad I got to play it and see it remade like this. I'd highly recommend giving it a try.
I don’t really have any desire to talk about most of Vallhalla, it’s well known and well liked, and I don’t have much to say that hasn’t already been said. I really just want to talk about Dorothy.
Dorothy is, at least in my perception, the most controversial aspect of Vallhalla. She’s a playful, flirty, talkative sex worker who looks 13 years old, and the game explicitly says this. She is not vaguely “young”, the game tells you she looks like a child and that she gets clients who want to have sex with her because she looks like a child. She details the jobs she has had to do and talks about the kinds of fantasies her body allows people to fulfill. This very understandably makes people uncomfortable and can definitely shift how you feel about the rest of the games blatant and overt sexuality.
When I first played this game sometime around its launch in 2016, Dorothy didn’t sit right with me. Her inclusion in the game felt like a poor decision at best and a thinly veiled “fetish” at worst, and I really couldn’t settle on which of those two options I had created in my head it was. Dorothy does talk bad about her clients, she calls them gross and creepy and predatory and like, sure. If the game didn’t do this, she would just be another character people would post softcore porn of in r/animememes with captions that say shit like “I look 12 but am actually 100! Kyah!”. But like, what was being said here? What about her calling her clients predatory justified her describing their fantasies and wishes so often? If the game wanted to call lolicons freaks, then why do it this way?
At the time I didn’t really have an answer, I couldn’t justify her inclusion in the game. If she had been cut from the game entirely and replaced with a scene where someone else says that pedophiles suck it would have been preferable to me, would’ve meant I didn’t have to read about her roleplaying as people’s daughters during sex. I can’t say Dorothy was the only factor in me dropping the game as a teen, but it was part of it; I dropped it about 3/4ths of the way through.
The game stayed with me though, and I knew at some point I’d replay it and finally see it through to the end. Finally, now, as an adult in 2023 I picked it back up and finished it, and I completely see Dorothy in a new light now.
Since I had last experienced the game, two things changed that led to this shift in opinion: I transgendered and I became a sex worker. Every single day, regardless of what I do, say, post, or want, my sex work revolves around me being a girl with a penis. Every client I get, every job I do, every single piece of content I make is tied to how people feel about trans women both consciously and unconsciously. When I read Dorothys dialogue, all of this new life experience made it all click for me. I’ve dealt with weird requests, had to do jobs for clients that made me feel gross. Her dialogue about wanting to cyberpunk body upgrade to a more adult appearance but choosing not to went from feeling like a lame excuse to a lived reality. Any thoughts about bottom surgery I have, regardless of if I want it or not, are filtered through knowing that if I do choose to get the procedure, I’ll be destroying any audience I’ve managed to build for myself. Her talking about the weird jobs she’s done doesn’t read like the writer’s kinks leaking through, it reads like how I talk about the weird jobs I’ve done. I have had the thought that I overshare to friends, that I talk too much about gross shit and should just not talk about it, but when I try it fucking sucks. I need an outlet to talk about that stuff, and for me I have close friends, but Vallhalla is a game about bartending so for Dorothy it's a bartender.
Last thing I want to mention is how often Dorothys safety is talked about in game. It’s something that I basically completely overlooked when I first played as a teen, but it’s brought up a lot. She’s modified herself to have a gun built into her hands, broadcast signal jammers disguised as wearable cat ears, has had to upgrade her skin to better recover from bruises. It’s all a bit silly, all explained with sci-fi technobabble, but it made it clear to me the writers understood that a character in Dorothys position is not safe, is forced to put herself in vulnerable positions for her job.
I just wanted to write this all out because it’s something I’ve never seen discussed when people talk about Dorothy. I don’t expect it to sit right with everybody, but if you had a sense of unease preventing you from enjoying the game, I hope maybe I’ve convinced you to give it another shot. Time to mix drinks and change lives.
Dorothy is, at least in my perception, the most controversial aspect of Vallhalla. She’s a playful, flirty, talkative sex worker who looks 13 years old, and the game explicitly says this. She is not vaguely “young”, the game tells you she looks like a child and that she gets clients who want to have sex with her because she looks like a child. She details the jobs she has had to do and talks about the kinds of fantasies her body allows people to fulfill. This very understandably makes people uncomfortable and can definitely shift how you feel about the rest of the games blatant and overt sexuality.
When I first played this game sometime around its launch in 2016, Dorothy didn’t sit right with me. Her inclusion in the game felt like a poor decision at best and a thinly veiled “fetish” at worst, and I really couldn’t settle on which of those two options I had created in my head it was. Dorothy does talk bad about her clients, she calls them gross and creepy and predatory and like, sure. If the game didn’t do this, she would just be another character people would post softcore porn of in r/animememes with captions that say shit like “I look 12 but am actually 100! Kyah!”. But like, what was being said here? What about her calling her clients predatory justified her describing their fantasies and wishes so often? If the game wanted to call lolicons freaks, then why do it this way?
At the time I didn’t really have an answer, I couldn’t justify her inclusion in the game. If she had been cut from the game entirely and replaced with a scene where someone else says that pedophiles suck it would have been preferable to me, would’ve meant I didn’t have to read about her roleplaying as people’s daughters during sex. I can’t say Dorothy was the only factor in me dropping the game as a teen, but it was part of it; I dropped it about 3/4ths of the way through.
The game stayed with me though, and I knew at some point I’d replay it and finally see it through to the end. Finally, now, as an adult in 2023 I picked it back up and finished it, and I completely see Dorothy in a new light now.
Since I had last experienced the game, two things changed that led to this shift in opinion: I transgendered and I became a sex worker. Every single day, regardless of what I do, say, post, or want, my sex work revolves around me being a girl with a penis. Every client I get, every job I do, every single piece of content I make is tied to how people feel about trans women both consciously and unconsciously. When I read Dorothys dialogue, all of this new life experience made it all click for me. I’ve dealt with weird requests, had to do jobs for clients that made me feel gross. Her dialogue about wanting to cyberpunk body upgrade to a more adult appearance but choosing not to went from feeling like a lame excuse to a lived reality. Any thoughts about bottom surgery I have, regardless of if I want it or not, are filtered through knowing that if I do choose to get the procedure, I’ll be destroying any audience I’ve managed to build for myself. Her talking about the weird jobs she’s done doesn’t read like the writer’s kinks leaking through, it reads like how I talk about the weird jobs I’ve done. I have had the thought that I overshare to friends, that I talk too much about gross shit and should just not talk about it, but when I try it fucking sucks. I need an outlet to talk about that stuff, and for me I have close friends, but Vallhalla is a game about bartending so for Dorothy it's a bartender.
Last thing I want to mention is how often Dorothys safety is talked about in game. It’s something that I basically completely overlooked when I first played as a teen, but it’s brought up a lot. She’s modified herself to have a gun built into her hands, broadcast signal jammers disguised as wearable cat ears, has had to upgrade her skin to better recover from bruises. It’s all a bit silly, all explained with sci-fi technobabble, but it made it clear to me the writers understood that a character in Dorothys position is not safe, is forced to put herself in vulnerable positions for her job.
I just wanted to write this all out because it’s something I’ve never seen discussed when people talk about Dorothy. I don’t expect it to sit right with everybody, but if you had a sense of unease preventing you from enjoying the game, I hope maybe I’ve convinced you to give it another shot. Time to mix drinks and change lives.