I always wanted save files to be people carving “i wuz here” into the rock that everyone passes by on the way into the place - I guess the closest thing to what I’m thinking about is like, high score screens? maybe
instead the dogged pursuit of artistic legitimacy inspired the devs of the biggest titles to give you a carbon copy rock for you to carve “i wuz here” into
but I dunno I always thought the idea of the little cute graphic in your memory card was really nice, like kind of a little passport stamp book for the different “places” you’ve been, and it sucks that it didn’t actually turn out that way; I’d love more “placeness” in games but it’s getting harder to find
Listening to a Chuck Berry song at 1:13 AM. It is two minutes and thirty-something seconds long. It’s perfect. I am pretty sure if you are going to discuss art you cannot separate it from how it’s delivered. Pretty sure there was a point where video games went from “singles” to “long plays” to “Tales from Topographic Oceans” and then eventually that shit stopped for the most part, thank goodness. Hoping this moment continues forever but I have no clue how we can discuss the past without tying it to hardware and the marketplace and their limitations/demands.
Not trying to shit on Yes there, I bet if I had quadruple digit bank account I’d buy myself a sequins robe in the style of Rick Wakeman and try and trick a government into bankrolling a “DDD: THE GENTLEST GIANT’S ICE CAPADES” skate show.
Herzog Zwei was surprisingly easy to pick up after I changed the controls. I enjoyed juggling anti-air units, love my portable border. Being on the ground sucks but I still like being able to hide in bases.
Wilmot’s Warehouse is satisfying, it reminded me of the catch mode in Tetris DS.
As a PS1 fan, this is probably blasphemy, but I didn’t know that was what chunky PS1 UI looked like until the PlayStation Classic came out and it gives me a headache every time I see it. The actual contents of the site are good tho
also popping back in to drop some unformed thought I have about how save files and musical scores have similarities in how they’re both signifiers of creators needing some kind of tool to expand their piece beyond a singular entity whether that be a play session or a musician
it seems like his frustration with the idea of the musical score is similar to @thecatamites’s frustration with save files in that what was initially intended to be a simple device ended up standing for and eventually consuming the conception of what the piece actually is; I’ve definitely heard lots of people refer to a score or notation as “the music” and it’s like, I’m sure you can think of a score as music if you’re a fuckin’ NERD, but that’s such an insular way to think about what music is because the only person that can perform that piece is you, in your head. it feels like the way a certain conception of what a save file represents ended up colonizing most of videogames in a pretty bad way, where everyone gets their own perfectly “unique” experience that every other damn person playing the game gets
but it’s not like these tools were created specifically for this colonization right? musical scores exist because unfortunately we don’t have 100 hands and can’t play an entire orchestra’s worth of instruments simultaneously, so they were created as a way to easily tell musicians what to play so these bigger works can exist. but now we’re getting to the point where software tools are both score and orchestra, and even though it’s shitty to declare that gig musicians are obsolete and shouldn’t exist, I still like the idea of a score + orchestra (scorechestra (I’m sorry)) as a space for a person to play in and mess with. I realized my ideal conception of sheet music notation is one that’s been marked up a bunch with all the notes and it’s because it contains a conversation between you and The Work, and I guess the digital music version of this is opening up a project in a DAW with all of the VSTs loaded and fucking around with things because it’s fun
Going Under is pretty interesting but not very good… « Work as an unpaid intern in a startup company by killing the workers of the numerous failed startup companies buried below » is a hell of a concept, but the humor in the game proper is just… an average familiar satire about the Silicon Valley. You’ll get slight chuckles -at best- and never real laughs
I guess I have unreasonable standards re: VG humour here. TBF this is still a way better and more unique setup than most other games. and the look is perfect for what it is. I like to hang out in the lobby, with its menacing corporate comfort:
The game falls apart in the actual dungeons. Combat is largely about using the random junk lying around: Grab a pencil or a table tennis racket, smash it on an enemy’s face until it breaks, or throw it. Then grab something else. Combat is almost nice! While enemies are hard to read, everything is kind of a mess, dashing feels bad, etc, well you can throw waste baskets at enemies, attack them with staplers and steal cars. There’s a real joyful sloppiness to it.
It is however completely at odds with the pretty strict hardcore roguelike difficulty. The game is difficult enough to rapidly nudge you into approaching its battles in the most efficient but boring way possible: fill your 3 slots with the same identical good weapons and smack & dodge. The game becomes easier to manage that way, but its flaws only become more apparent. The irony of a game about corporate culture that forces you to become a boring drone to get somewhere is palpable
i’m not really a purist about experience so after sleeping on it i think what bugs me about save files is maybe just that they exemplify how a particular continuous, directed form of attention has kind of muscled out all the other kinds of attention you can bring to these things: grazing them, skimming them, rifling around in there. a false depth displacing what can be productive shallowness.
my ideal save system would maybe be something like the pawn nexus in dragon’s dogma but for narrative / spatial snapshots - flip through incongruous narrative states, tones, mechanical circumstances. the experience of playing an rpg maker game while simultaneously opening it in the editor and just having it be a big disconnected database to move around in.
it’s funny because this approach already exists in many ways! wandering through people’s animal crossing islands and seeing what they have and what you could have had, getting strange unexplained premonitions of the future through player messages in souls games, etc. listening to the soundtrack of a game outside of the game itself, hearing and daydreaming about places you haven’t seen. skipping through chapters in VNs. but it’s almost like the more these things spread into vast collections of heterogeneous material the more invested they get in a phantom form of pure, individualised experience to hold them together, as exemplified by the personal save file. i guess i feel increasingly unwilling to adopt this pose of innocent good faith just to get my biannual fix of machine-induced fever brain.
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ANYWAY a machine-induced fever brain i played today was the ds version of dragon quest iv. it goes ok. i am not mad about being stuck in yakov smirnoff zone for the ongoing chapter.
