Monkey Island 2 Special Edition having dev commentary track makes it way more enjoyable than Monkey 1 Special. The art looks closer to the original game art, which was largely scanned concept art unlike the first Monkey when they did not have scanners and had to recreate the concept art using DX Paint. It’s still wild how it’s an ‘updated’ version that’s a decade old so it looks dated as hell but better than Monkey 1. IMuse was a hella good tech that could have seen some better use later. It still impresses me thirty plus years later.
2 weeks of vampire survivors parasitising my malcolm x autobiography reading time. The problem is not exactly that it abuses cruel and cheap manipulative techniques to keep your eyes glazed and your brain hazed but that it uses these weapons to no interesting end. You beat your first level and it’s boring drip fed unlocks forever. It’s never hard, there is no cryptic mystery even though it feels like there’s no way there couldn’t be, there’s no interesting strategy… the real currency is your time and you can feel the tiny poison drop of grief every time you start a new run and know that for the next 15 minutes you will do nothing but travel that little bit closer to the grave.
Anyway I just bought dungeon encounters (dung count) on switch and in the first hour experienced a delicious unravelling of numbers so thrilling it gave me the strength to delete vamp surv off my phone. Number salivation… number salvation
Continuing my Genesis Mini 2 enjoyment I started Shining In The Darkness, finally. The first and only dungeon I saw was very simple. You only have attack and use Herb. The battles seem to happen less if you continously move but if you are cautiously moving (or trying to map out on graph paper) you might get a battle every step. I got into a dangerous battle my first step into the dungeon and didn’t see one that hard for the rest of the 90 minutes.
Eventually I ran into the first boss, a giant enemy crab, which destroyed me and sent me back to town with half my gold. That makes SiTD more kind than most of its kind.
Continuing it seems ill-advised because the whole dungeon looks identical and very frequently I would lose focus or come out of a battle and be completely lost and as someone that has to keep eyes on a small child at all times lest the worst happen and has a family history of advanced age memory loss it is not my idea of fun. A pure unbridled panic as I go “where am I?”
Flipping through internet user reviews it seems like This Is The Game. Advancing in identical hallway dungeons, retreating, buying (hopefully) one piece of armor and more herbs and advancing again until you need to retreat. Sometimes see a new enemy sprite. The music and sprites are all delightful.
More on the Genesis Mini 2 which you know, you can’t buy. I really somewhat understand why the SNES mini only had 20 games, this has something like 50 and while sure there are duds there, the full volume makes up for it, and it still feels currated. Like it just lifts up the whole thing with this many B Grade 16-bit Video Games. I mean yes you could get to 50 on the SNES and still have A-Grade stuff to go. And that this is the second batch with some Sega CD means it is so scatter shot. I debated about casually ranking it but that just feels like too big of a task. I’ll still probably do it.
Shining in the Darkness though, especially after the PC Engine experience it is quick, the key graphics are fantastic, It’s definitely playable, though it drew me to Etrian Odyssey. Pretty good 90 minutes of video game I had there.
And with save states I can work my way through Ecco 1, which is only mildly sadistic so far. Ecco rules. What an evil video game.
Hot damn this is a hot one, very similar to the GBC version of Metal Gear Solid. It’s a top down action stealth collect-a-thon. There’s risk vs reward on every screen. Levels are sprawling with multiple houses and screens to go in. If you’re spotted you run 5x as fast, so sometimes you want to get spotted to clear rooms faster, since there’s a very tight time limit. You can also get snowballs, and these come into play very strategically because you can throw them at children and cops to stun them and get past them. It’s challenging, fun, and not too taxing. It’s a very well put together game, I wouldn’t say “perfect” but there’s a lot of very solid design choices happening here. If this were a coin op game in the 90s it would be a cult hit.
When I first learned that the designer of Vampire Survivors was a developer of casino software who was between jobs, I liked the idea of using those techniques for “good.” But although the game doesn’t have obvious evils such as microtransactions, random “packs” of things, or a requirement to play at certain times to get things (I wouldn’t touch it if it had any of these elements), it ultimately is still pretty manipulative and disrespectful of your time.
But I don’t think I regret spending however much time I have on it. I’ve never felt compelled to play only to “progress” in some way without enjoying the experience at all. Then again, my nephew unlocked a lot of things for me so I had it easy.
This is one of those games that makes me wonder whether it’s ever crossed the developer’s mind how many hours of people’s time the game has taken, overall, and what that realization would be like. A positive thing? A negative thing?
Been playing the new Pokemon Violet DLC The Indigo Disk.
The gimmick is you become a transfer student to a submarine Pokemon school that has a giant biodome at the bottom of the ocean for no reason other than to intimidate other organisations with their wealth. Hundreds presumably died to construct it.
Kieran, the child from the last DLC that we traumatised with our Mary Sue powers, returns as the main antagonist. He’s now the champion battler of the entire school and pressures the administrative department to allow the transfer student to compete so he can get revenge. Now we must let loose our protagonist energy on a new school.
All trainer fights are doubles matches which is neat for changing up the strategy given the player likely has a team of all lv. 75+ Pokemon at this point. Synergy and countering synergy go some way to balancing against pure grind though you can mostly still just brute force the type weakness game.
The game has daily quests now and, unfortunately for a dex-schmuck like me, they are necessary to spawn all Pokemon.
S/V open world design is mostly open plains and inclines, with natural landmarks, and some cave networks. Pokemon are the only real event of note that you can encounter since items are mostly junk. There’s a point with each game and expansion where you know the full limits of the dex after having seen 90% of the species and the world feels very small after that point. This happens more quickly in the DLC and I’m at the point where cleaning up the stubborn evolutions and remaining fights is all I have left.
I couldn’t stand Sword and Shield so I’m not sure why I have a soft spot for the game given its jank and borderline dark UX elements. I’ve been playing with this character and party for over a year. The sense of journey is persistent. You can tackle things in a very flexible order and the school element makes it plausibly feel like my character has been studying in between having their chosen one adventures. I’ve made small cosmetic changes to them over time to try and reflect my imagined character development (Pokemon doesn’t really offer much else). Got them on a trajectory of going through an experimental phase with different fashions and hair styles before levelling out into something more understated as they near graduation. I want innocence mostly lost by the time I finish the final epilogue.
more bloodborne notes, extra self-indulgent this time
I looped to NG+ in bloodborne. The intro cinematic makes a little more sense having played through the game - the werewolf that menaces you is one of the fleshy, rotting versions from Yahar’gul, and it teleports in with the same effect that the transformed Yarnhamites there do once you can see the blood moon in the sky.
The Mensis school is trying to abduct you before you get your bearings, and they have a history of using things associated with hunters in apparently subversive ways - the Winter Lanterns have giant exposed brains made of dead messengers, and they’re dressed like the doll in the Hunter’s dream. Even the Brain of Mensis appears to be made of a large number of dead messengers? Maybe the One Reborn is made of the bodies of hunters, all glued together?
So the Mensis school made their great breakthroughs by applying Pthumerian necromancy unearthed in the catacombs to the raw material made available to human beings by the Moon Presence, who wants humans to become Hanged Men, who are living sacrifices suspended between life and death, for… reasons… and whose star is the blood moon, which their rituals (including giving the version of Queen Yharnam in the collective unconscious a c-section through some entity it’s impossible for the player character to have enough insight to see - killing it and returning the royal heir [also too mind-shattering to be perceived] is what ends the Mensis ritual, and with it the hunt) are summoning - why are they doing this? Probably to overcome death? This is a From Software fantasy game, after all. And the people on the streets of Yahar’gul start infinitely respawning even without the player resetting the level once the blood moon is visible.
The 19th century saw the widespread realization that there is nothing essential about humankind, the human is a kind of emulsion, its components are easy to separate. What we take to be normal is in fact radically contingent. The tools of rational analysis, the techniques of statistics, engineering, and bureaucracy make it easy to dismember and distort ourselves. Isolate an aspect of reality, operationalize and quantify it, then you can grow it, shrink it, remove it, reattach it. But you may not understand what effects it may have on the whole. They may be disastrous; singlemindedly repeat a single action on a large enough scale for long enough and you may just end the world. FOSSIL FUELS
Verbal and mathematical concepts seem to hang, fixed like stars on the celestial spheres, above this flux of actually-existing matter. But our ability to engage with these things, our access to the conceptual world, is contingent on our anatomy, spelled out in our genes. How much of it these things are actually universal, in what sense can they really be said to exist?
How bodily changes would affect the perception of the conceptual world is for us a matter of conjecture, but in Bloodborne, the medium of genetic information is microscopic crystals that circulate in the bloodstream. Injecting another organism’s blood can change the body’s form even in mature organisms, giving bodies a kind of plasticity that only minds exhibit in reality.
Yarnham’s plague of beasts comes from the mass injection of ritual blood discovered in the catacombs of Loran, another land that fell to the same phenomenon. Likewise the ultra-neotenic star-child brain trust in the Healing Church orphanage came from injecting blood from the Isz catacombs into patients taken to the Research Hall. (There is a pleasant symmetry here - kin are neotenic, beasts are gerontomorphic. Humans and their domesticated animals are more neotenic than wild animals, so the human/beast dichotomy comes naturally, and grey aliens read as more-human-than-human.)
“The blood makes us human, makes us more than human, makes us human no more. Our eyes are yet to open. Evolution without courage will be the ruin of our race. By the gods, fear it, Laurence. Fear the old blood.”
Per wiktionary, 恐れ, like the English ‘fear’ can also imply ‘revere’ instead of just ‘be frightened by’. Wilhelm is a relic of the pre-scentific era, his mind is full of theology and philosophy, but his students live in the stark, amoral world of pure instrumental reason, like tech bros or people who work in the Pentagon. Unconstrained by reverence, they use the social form of the church as just another tool, like the finance industry uses debt or the marketing industry uses imagery and poetry. Their virtues are bloodless and inhuman.
I love that this game meaningfully engages with the question, “What does it mean to be human in the modern era?” and turns it into a grotesque high melodrama drawing on imagery from two centuries of horror fiction! It’s really a cut above the rest of their games as a literary object, imo because of the modern setting. Also man being a bridge is why they don’t let you buy bloodstone chunks.
ape out from the other day- bennett foddy as usual the best part of anything he touches (did the art in this), soundtrack is compelling, gameplay is pretty fun when it flows, unfortunately let down by difficulty spikes which may be partly due to procedural generation of levels (not giving you enough cover). game is stuck between run-and-gun mayhem and stealth and it really should have stuck to the former by beefing your health a little bit. got to level 8 and died a bajillion times, grew frustrated
Shining in the Darkness is such a beautifully simple game?? considering the shoestring budget they really put the effort into the most important places - and I’m always mesmerised by how engaging such a bare-bones dungeon crawler can be (like you mentioned, it only takes one new piece of armor and a few more herbs to make the next dungeon run feel like a new step in the right direction).
Perpetually fascinated by the team’s decision to frame the game as a story told by some sage-like figure that exists in the darkness - and I’m glad they kept this trope up in almost all of the other Shining games. It’s also so wild to see early camelot staples like the animated graphic UI elements.
Also, it’s such a small feature but I really appreciate that the enemy sprites wriggle and move - shifting their on-screen position ever so slightly - in battles. Genesis really DOES what nintenDON’T.
