Right but there’s some rigamarole about checking out the mall which is supposed to be closed until you take care of the moles at the dig site. I def remember following a guide that admitted “sometimes this part is bugged and you have to repeat stuff until the mine opens up”, and having exactly that worst case experience that it predicted. Maybe there’s something in Fourside that can accidentally undo one of those event switches?
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just give miner hamburger, talk about runaway five and check mine til you get in maybe. maybe hes really hungry, maybe he needs more hamburgers. give him a hamburger while you have heat stroke
spin the unfair spinning men slot machine ten times, get heatstroke, eat a hamburger, give a different hamburger to the mining worker. i love pretending that extra nonsense steps are part of the ritual
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well sure maybe i didn’t give that poor guy enough hamburgers
i usually take this part of the game as an excuse to kill criminal caterpillars and try in vain to reunite the sesame seeds in the desert
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I’ve only ever seen the ending of this game because I wanted to see how that one song was used in context. I have no idea if it was used elsewhere & they were reprising it for thematic reasons, or if it really is just the final boss/ending music, but it’s very strange. Also the dino’s weird screams…and the visual composition of the party standing on a tiny ledge with the dino’s head off to the side. The treasure hunter G final boss…a videogame thing I think about sometimes
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the sesame seeds are the first thing i do in the desert because i cant stand to think about how they’re lost and cant find eachother, well the first thing i actually do is get heatstroke while searching for sesames
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one of the most understated cute parts of mother 3 is when you ride down Pokey’s tunnel of Earthbound nostalgia and see the two sesames together again at last
im sure there’s a read where M3 is going OMG THATS WRONG SOMEHOW but like i cant overstate how much M3 leaves me colder and colder each time i replay it. who care. Let the sesames hang
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earthbound is one of my very favorite games, and i have written so much about it that i won’t belabor my 2 drive-by points
- earthbound, to me, is significantly better than mother 3. mother 1 is the one i’d say doesn’t particularly hold up other than how dreamlike and bizarre it is, mother 2 largely obsoletes it in my mind, and makes things way more reasonable and less grindy. however, the music in 1 is iconic, and the music in 2 is perfect. the music in 3 is very good, but it still ends up in the shadow of the other 2 imo
- i actually feel like onett to fourside inclusive is probably the strongest sequence of the game, and things fall off a smidge afterward starting with summers
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alright welp time for me to replay Earthbound and reassess it for myself cuz in my memory Summers to the end of the game is where it went from a very funny postmodern Dragon Quest to a formative video game narrative that imprinted on my very soul lol
Like, everything from eating the magic cake and collapsing into the Mu initiation up to the end of the game is where EB ramps into bugnuts psychedelic genius. You get your limbs and head ripped off and nearly have your mind taken by the spirit of Mu, you destroy the Kraken, you go into Dungeon Man, you see Ness’s thoughts projected in Lumine Hole, you jump down into the Lost Underworld and then get drawn into the mental world of Magicant to battle your inner evil, you experience your parents loving you as an infant, you achieve enlightenment (as represented by Ness getting a thousand level ups and stat boosts) and then save your family & Onett from a wjole ass alien invasion only to get irreversibly chucked into the future as a bunch of robot children. you fight Giygas. and your childhood bully/friend, whose boss theme flips from an NES chiptune song to fuckin thrash metal
imho the stuff that really turns EarthBound from an RPG with a weird road movie plot (already a great hook) into the memorably brilliant batshit game it’s remembered as happens in the second 1/2
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my general undirected opinion about Earthbound is that Earthbound is a great game and we can mete out which sections are too slow or grindy or don’t work as well but the final package is kind of unimpeachable and you should just use the speed up emulator features through the battles if you’re playing on something that allows that.
if anything, Earthbound is one of the best examples of proof that improved technical capabilities of games with more testing and more refined flow or whatever else don’t necessarily make a better overall experience at all.
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There’s some real good sound effects throughout. The chunky alarm sound is also a classic.
Glad you pointed out Bone Dino. A shambling Dinosaur corpse pushing itself out of the earth only to be beaten until it returns is a weird denouement.
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I tried Demon’s remake but felt really ill and had to lie down for a bit. Same with Resi 4 remake. That blurriness during the camera movement messes with my head. Sucks!
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If Demon’s remake had a way to keep the original sfx and music I think I’d love it
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yeah this always baffled me for so many of these guys. i played a version of Storyteller in 2011 that i think won an IGF award that year and it felt fundamentally not very different from all i can tell of what ended up getting released 12 years later. i guess getting notice in that scene in 2011 still means more than it does now hence the Annapurna treatment but it’s just weird. if that game had commercially released by the end of 2013 or whatever i’m sure it would have done okay. i make fun of it a lot but the whole Chris Hecker “finish your game” stuff messed up a lot of people’s chances at success by pushing them to work on things for years and years and years that did not need that much more time and did not substantially add anything super new to them to the point where they were far outside the original moment and didn’t do so well. they really thought that the market would stay with them and it didn’t. it’s one thing if most of these were really complex and multifaceted games, but most of them aren’t. it’s just sad.
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Same. I couldn’t play RE4R. It was a mistake to try to make games look better than gamecube graphics
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i have to turn off motion blur in every modern game for this reason
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[emerging from the jungle after 7-8 years of trudging through the bush in clown shoes] yeah
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I’m interested in the motion blur issue coming up here because I’ve seen it in a few games now and have thought it’s nice and fine
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I could see how it may disorient some people and maybe even make them feel unwell. But if I’m playing a game for long enough it’s one of those post-processing effects like extra depth of field or film grain that I feel no problem turning off most of the time.
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