LOOK WHAT CANIA DID TO MY STEAM FEED!
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yeah that was when she got like NPR huge out of nowhere and then wound up doing music for games and I havenât really liked her output since but
this is good
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i recommended it and then fell off so maybe take it with a grain of salt
i should stream that some more
but also itâs not as though Korea hasnât had experience with Japan, or that lots of Korean-Americans grew up with their parents making Japanese dishes for them.
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or even the willful conflation of east asian identity by others in the US â a 33 year old Korean-American woman would have lived through the height of Japanese soft power and almost certainly had to deal with âincorrectâ othering
my Korean friends in college certainly had complex relationships to Japan and Japanese media
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absolutely, my point was that having a loose and complex relationship to an âadjacentâ (in vector space nationalism) identity is way too nuanced and interesting in any event for me to want to criticize and I think itâs cool that she was hung up on it enough to name her band that
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i hear ya! was just extending what i felt you meant.
of what i played of it Sable felt like the one of the best examples to me of âeveryone working on this had a different idea of what the game was and they didnât communicate to each other very well at allâ. the tone of the writing didnât match the feeling of the world at all, which is a real problem. iâm sure plenty of talented people were involved with the game but it doesnât matter how much technical skill you have if you canât make something that knows what it is at a basic level.
plus it felt like a game directed by a visual artist who didnât really understand game design that well. this is a recently more common phenomenon (i.e. GRIS) that is kind of annoying to observe. itâs like weâve reinvented the Amiga era of games. obviously iâd prefer a game that looks like shit but plays interestingly though i donât know why i need to choose.
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you donât, there are plenty of games that both look and play like shit just waiting for you!
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re: japanese breakfast
it never raised any red flags for me, it actually just passed completely undetected but maybe thatâs me being sympathetic to asian americans who feel like they donât really have a cultural identity because of the whole ânot american enough to be american, not asian enough to be asianâ kind of thing
it makes a lot of intuitive sense to me to be like, fuck it, if no one is going to actually do the work to figure out who I am I might as well pick a name that sounds interesting
reminds me of tsu zing (a chinese techno artist) whoâs like âyeah I just put in chinese drums because they sound cool, I never actually listened to them beforeâ
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Michelle Zauner has a complicated relationship with her hometown of Eugene.
Take Japanese Breakfast, the moniker under which Zauner releases musicâthe name was partially inspired by Zaunerâs childhood growing up with a white father and Korean mother outside the Oregon college town, where many of her peers assumed she was Japanese. Some didnât even know Korea was a country.
âBeing in Eugene as a teenager kind of sucks,â says Zauner. âIt wasnât an incredibly diverse town, especially then.â
After moving to Pennsylvania for college, Zauner moved back to Eugene in 2014 to care for her mom, who was dying of cancer. She wrote her first album as Japanese Breakfast in Oregon while dealing with the loss of her mother.
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also my feelings on sable is that itâs very pretty and i did like the writing? iâd love to hear more thoughts about the tone mismatch â i havenât finished it yet but i didnât feel like the writing was out of step with the âgo find yourselfâ light adventure story. i appreciated that it wasnât spun as some kind of apocalyptic/survivor thing and showed all these different communities arising and making it work out in the desert
i forgave the clunkiness of the controls because itâs not like weâre swimming in pretty nonviolent games about communities caring for each other instead of engaging in endless military struggle. give me them unfinished if you have to, the jingoist bloodfest games certainly are too
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Rudie is my tour guide through Xbox Game Pass this week so I also fired up Sable. I had to turn down all the graphics settings to make it run well on my laptop and somehow I think the loss of resolution/detail etc kind of makes it feel better. Hard for me to say why.
The writing is okay, my main beef is that the kidâs narrative voice sounds more like an adult. Maybe Iâm not giving kids enough credit, though.
I donât love the gamefeel. I rolled my eyes pretty hard when the game almost immediately gives you a gliding ability. Feels like a late addition to the game, the devs admitting that the movement mechanics kind of sucked otherwise. And then they went back and tied it back into the narrative to make it seem like less of a mechanical crutch (the whole âGlidingâ name for the little sojourn).
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I donât know how they pulled it off but Sable runs like total shit on my series x and the stuttering and tearing really takes me out of the chill moebius vibe
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when i said âraised eyebrowâ what iâm referring to is hearing the name of the band without knowing anything about the people who are in it, obviously. as someone who routinely would see stickers for a band called âTall Black Girlsâ (they were not) posted around the city in the aughts, my default with any musician is to first assume the worst.
what people are âallowedâ to do artistically is an entirely different conversation i have no energy for, and how diaspora works is obviously a completely different thing, but yeah, i mean, unless i misread Rudieâs thoughts here, this is what i was getting at
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did a quick Google search about that other band before posting to make sure i wasnât hallucinating and immediately found the perfect headline to embody that era
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More than any other recent project it feels like a small art test, visual art from someone immersed in games but not making them, got picked up and forced by the insistent commercial pull of virality into a publishing deal and a need to be content. They had all the best advisors and money to tell them how to design content and they plucked the best and most tasteful collaborators to write and sound and help them, and they pushed it into the shape of a game none of them were prepared to make or even necessarily wanted.
The writing is very good in a vacuum but it illustrates exactly how smart Dragon Quest has always been to keep the text boxes short and underplayed. The writing works very hard and spends a lot of words crafting sensory detail in a fully rendered world. It cuts up the game pace, where a player is juggling five micro-objectives, with an unsighted encompassing diversion. It demands a lot of attention off a player who has full movement control, and it reinforces how considered the playerâs relationship to their character should be in a text heavy game. Distance, less-kinaesthetic movement, and larger, more involved goals are necessary for Big Writing to work in a game, I think.
The controls, objectives, and goal stringing is the worst sort of imaginatuon-stifling Best Practices. Yes, itâs all technically correct, players are given their goals, they spot it on the horizon and through their own agency reach and accomplish it, but it manages to make Breath of the Wild feel practically geriatric through the barest,
least-imaginative implementation.
I could live with that if the initial promise that sold the concept worked. A jetbike shimmering across a Moebius desert. Give me an expressive flowing solitude and I can find a way to pull meaning out of almost anything. That the jetbike sits like a dead lump of clay in the hand, that they havenât even attempted to convey any feeling of speed or grace or flow â at that point there was nothing left, the game wasnât a game but a collection of consulted work to make a saleable product.
afterwards, I played Zineth again
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You might like The Long Drive, an incredibly janky game but you can drive old cars across an endless procedurally generated wasteland. Itâs fun
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Couldnt sleep so I played a bit of 20th Century Food Court, a part of Last Call BBS, and got pissed because my job is figuring out how things work with no documentation and I donât want my games to contain a step function for the purpose of debugging.
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Have been hankerin to play a Final Fantasy game. I just started IX last night and am enjoying the tone this time after bouncing off it long ago. Iâve always been curious about the 2D games, I havenât played any. And, of course, XIII and XV interest me as controversial titles. XII Zodiac Edition is still stupidly expensive so I donât know when I will ever play that. But IX is cute so far. I only got through the opening, to the crash in the forest.
But also I lately finished Ico. It was great!!! I just love the architecture and the way the game looks, so soft and worn. My favorite part of the game was whenever you saw an elevator or a series of big pumps and plumbing structures, the weird suggestion of industry among the far, far away fantasy of the rest of it. Still, to return to the original discussion which got me to play the game, I think that Ico is definitely the touchstone Team Ico game over Shadow of the Colossus. Its influence (and indirect influence, like devs just doing what theyâve heard other people say Ico does) is everywhere. Doesnât feel like that is true with Shadow of the Colossus.
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