lately i’ve played:
picross 3d -
picross is great, we all know that, i don’t need to talk about it at length here. what i like about playing it in 3d is the routine of analyzing where i’m at plane-by-plane on one side of the puzzle, then rotating it and doing the same thing from a different angle, repeat and repeat until it’s all done. the physicality of it makes it an even more meditative experience for me than regular picross. i’m a fan!
i’ve made it roughly 3/4 of the way through this ds entry, and my only real gripe is the game’s jarring choice of mascot. on the top screen during every puzzle sits a horrendously cubist…duck? chick? you can see them in this arbitrarily swiped screenshot. they bend, spin, stretch, jiggle around, and generally enjoy their time existing in a 3-dimensional space as much as i am enjoying the game itself. it’s unnerving.
warioware: touched! -
sat down and “beat” this in one sitting after work, a pleasant way to spend an evening for sure. it’s up there with kirby canvas curse in terms of ds games that make the system’s touchscreen feel like a worthwhile manufacturing investment. every time i play one of these i’m simultaneously amazed at both how ahead-of-their-time the warioware games feel (at launch they were a novelty, but now social media has trained people’s attention spans to be short enough that the games make even more sense) and how nintendo hasn’t made a warioware for mobile yet.
monster hunter rise -
in the past i’ve beaten (and no more than beaten) monster hunter 3u, 4u, and world. i didn’t like any of them, but wanted so badly to convince myself that i did. i’ve long thought of monster hunter as long stretches of tedium punctuated by brief moments where the confluence of the knowledge i’ve accumulated and the agency i have as a player creates something tasty and well-earned, like cutting a tail or landing a charged strike on a head. those moments were always too few and far between for me to want to stick with the game for any real length of time.
rise, though, is the biggest step in the right direction i’ve seen the series take. 4 had a great verb-expansion in adding tangible verticality, and world cut down a lot of tedium (no more gathering herbs one 5-second animation at a time, saints be praised), so i’ve been hopeful about the trajectory of monster hunter as a whole for a while and this entry makes me feel like things are really coming to fruition. it’s almost entirely thanks to one simple addition: wirebugs!
the wirebugs acting as a multifaceted currency-on-a-cooldown being exchanged for a pleasant array of player decisions is such a good design choice i really and truly can’t imagine ever playing another monster hunter game without them. i can use up wirebugs for special moves that have a long cooldown, or whip myself through the air for better positioning with a faster cooldown. the management of wirebugs is one of constant decision-making, and that is a good thing as it provides more dynamism to the fights and is doing a great job of keeping me engaged and willing to grind.
i think a genius addition is the ability to dodge out of being thrown through the air with a wirebug – there have been many situations in which i used all my wirebugs on special moves, got walloped, and had to eat a monster’s follow-up attack because i was still in the cooldown. watching the wirebug meter refill, hoping it’ll be back in time to make it out of the clobbering…that’s great tension! and what makes it work perfectly is knowing that it’s all based on my choices. it’s a new layer to the combat and i can’t praise it enough.
to praise wirebugs further: even in the you’ll-be-doing-this-a-lot movement from camp to monster, the wirebugs make traversing the map mentally engaging – and the maps have been built with new levels of verticality to reflect this! it’s great! i can zip through the air along any trajectory or run straight up walls, and all of these actions have a tangible sense of weight to them.
i am tired of talking about monster hunter now but there are even more niceties in this newest entry that i didn’t even get to. i’m enjoying this one.
super metroid -
i played through this over the past two nights, the only metroid game in the quadrilogy i’ve never beaten. the first third or so of the game is a pleasant romp, constantly acquiring new abilities as the map expanded around me. there’s some point not long after that where the game feels like it opens up quite a bit and the lock-and-key structure operates on a much larger spatial scale. at that point i was desperately wishing for an etrian odyssey-esque ability to make notes on the map, because i am very forgetful! i oftentimes found myself reduced to wandering lost at the edges of the known world, hoping that whatever little corner i found myself poking away at would be the way forward.
it was tedious and boring, and was one of the avenues in which i’m of two minds about this game: if that sensation is intentional, that sense of powerlessness and the in-game actualization of being hopelessly lost in a foreign space, then that’s a powerful and respectable design decision. if it’s a byproduct of poor communication with the player (and there are a few examples of this, the walljump animals and the maridia glass tube being particularly noteworthy) then i consider it a pretty major failure of design. to be clear, if it’s the former, it doesn’t make me like the game any more while i’m in the midst of playing it, but it does make me reflect on it more fondly as a calculated and memorable experience.
the most notable avenue i’m conflicted about is the sensation of movement in the game. everything has an awful, sickly weighted feeling to it, and the few situations in which it doesn’t (like shinesparking) are so floaty that it’s unpleasantly jarring in the over-contrast rather than freeing. the visual feedback of space jumping does not mesh in my mind with the rhythm of button input and even when i’m nailing it 10+ jumps in a row i’m feeling off-put rather than triumphant. and the quicksand!
i cannot get past how infuriating it was to get knocked into the quicksand by an enemy and free myself. i would have rather eaten a very hot pepper every time. there was another instance of motion (being underwater without the gravity suit) that felt acutely disgusting, but i can understand that as a means to steer the player away from exploring that area without the proper ability. the quicksand, in contrast, was nothing more than punishment, a finger wagged in my face for being such a fool as to not traverse a room flawlessly.
maybe the whole game, even kinesthetically, is supposed to drip with the ugly, gravid, swollen bio-experimentation vibe that many of the boss fights give off. that’s very possible! i found that the world feels both like it doesn’t want me there (the flora and fauna exist contentedly in their own ecosystems; there is a sense of established space that i’m intruding on) and like it was made for me in a secret, horrifying way, the way samus fits into all these strange little crevices and tunnels. it’s alluring, memorable, and even though i didn’t really enjoy my time playing the game i’m enjoying thinking back on it.
i really am stuck with that question: are the things i found off-putting about the game intentional? is the game that carefully crafted? it’s not a super far-fetched possibility because the previous game in the series comes across that way, harnessing the claustrophobia of the game boy screen for an experience bordering on horror. gonna go watch a super metroid speedrun and see if the movement on display there changes my mind at all.
i also somehow made it through the whole game without picking up the charge beam and softlocked myself on the final boss – why is tourian inescapable after entry? without the charge beam i simply did not have enough consumable projectiles to kill it, and screw attacking its face damaged me too much to survive. i gave it a good few tries and then patched in a code for more super missiles since i was playing it emulated in order to stream it for my partner. i really was willing to subject myself to finding the charge beam as well as poking around every grey square on the map to collect more ammunition, but the game just wouldn’t let me. a frustrating way to cap it all off.
rhythm heaven -
playing the gba one, i just started and got through the first wave of games with perfect scores. this is certainly a cousin to warioware but the particulars of this series suit me better: meditations on a central and unified theme, games with enough depth such as to hold up over a minute or so rather than only a few seconds, no fuss about any sort of central plot or story. i’m also pleasantly surprised at how strict they’re willing to make the timing, a commendable counterpoint to contemporaneously-new-on-the-scene rhythm games like guitar hero. i have very good timing and rhythm from being forged in the furnaces of iidx and i can’t get higher than a low 90 (out of 100) on the rhythm test.
seeing the strictness they’re willing to put on display, i’m looking forward to being humbled by further challenges the game has to offer. i’ve played this in the past, emulated, but it’s a treat to play it on real hardware: the original model ds buttons feel great for this sort of thing, and i imagine an sp would as well.
