gotta write my thoughts before i forget em all cos it’s gonna be too long until i continue my peg mission:
the last story (wii)
wow! i wasn’t expecting anything from this but i actually really enjoyed it. its low production values are deftly swept aside by its brevity and pacing; everything is always moving along at a great clip and you get to hit all the jrpg beats in like 1/4th the usual time.
i particularly appreciated the rate that new verbs were added to the combat, which maybe seems like damning with faint praise but it’s the kind of mechanical pacing that would get offloaded onto a skill tree nowadays (ew), whereas here it was just kinda dealt out without any scaffolding; you’d be in the middle of a battle when suddenly: here’s a new thing you can do! it was so nice to have that part of the progression not taking up any of my mental real estate.
it also looks awesome. not like, graphically or artistically (the character models and facial animations in particular are extremely uncanny at times) but like… as a videogame. each of the aforementioned combat verbs always elevated the average level of videogame-looking-ness; now there’s 3D lines tracking the aggro of every enemy, now there’s circles on the ground everywhere, now you’re running up walls and doing plunging attacks to break spells, like… this is videogames.
also this is a wii game that doesn’t use motion controls at all! what a treat! i get to enjoy bloomed-to-hell smeary muddy wii graphics while big sprawlin on my couch and never worrying about my relation to the wii-mote sensor. bless.
practical/technical stuff aside: this game is so good for hangin out. it’s so unobtrusive and light-hearted and relaxed. i wasn’t super down with the english accents at first (not helped by the weirdly pervasive and left-field sexism) but by the end i was chillin; and it’s better than americans tryna do ye olde fantasy voices.
i really liked the town, and i even liked the story well enough; it’s no great piece of literature, but it was nicely paced, and, again because of its size, it managed to not over-use its story-telling methods/gimmicks (introducing QTEs for the fight with asthar was so hype i was big yellin). it’s still very funny to me that the main bad guy is straight up just ganondorf, like… this game is on the same system as twiglit princess like… people are guna notice. lol.
i wish i had something smarter to say, some kinda thesis on Why This Game Is Good Actually, but hopefully the amount that i’ve written can suffice.
go play the last story it’s wonderful.
that’s the only game on my list that i’ve played since last time. next up is probably koudelka but that won’t be until next year cos i’m going away for christmas and i wanna play it at home on the CRT w buddies watching.
demon’s souls (ps3)
maybe you’ve heard of this one.
i played this a tiny little bit like way back in 2016 when i first moved in w dylan, but only up to the first boss (which i don’t think i beat cos i’d never played a fromsoft game at that point) so i basically went into this completely blind – i’ve never seen this played anywhere else and had no idea what to expect. turns out… it’s just (“just”) castlevania! it’s got big long linear-ish levels with high-spectacle and (mostly) low-difficulty bosses at the end of them. it rules!
now don’t get me wrong, i love birds-nest corkscrew gordian knot level design as much as the next idiot, but i was surprised at just how much i appreciated the more linear approach. it meant that the hard bit of each level was the run-up to the boss, rather than the boss itself. and as a result, bosses got to be way stupider and more gimmicky than they would become (by and large) in the later games, without overstaying their welcome. the few bosses that were more (what we would now consider) traditional, were the ones that stood out to me as the least fun entries, because i spent enough time in their respective levels that i was abraded by the inevitable rough patches.
a couple of my housemates are playing (“playing”) elden ring rn, and i found it so instructive to experience these two games in such close proximity. and it made me realise that i fucking hate elden ring. i don’t wanna dodge speedrunner-arms-race attack strings for 100 hours. i want encounter design god damn it! i want levels, not biomes!
speaking of, i cannot emphasise enough just how fucked up i was when i discovered that you can mantle some waist-high walls in certain places. my trust in the honesty of the geometry was absolutely devastated. it makes sense that they removed this in the later games but also it owns so much.
also also, it is wild to me how much stuff they got right on their “first” try. like easily 75% of what makes dark souls sick is right there in demon’s souls.
penny’s big breakaway (pc)
oh my god i love this game.
i actually played all the way through this when it was on super duper sale on humble bundle one time, but i enjoyed it so much that bought my own copy after moving to my new computer (it’s runs a-so-nice on my lil laptop) and god damn it is so good to boot up a game, play for 5 minutes, complete a level, then turn it off and go back to whatever i was doing feeling refreshed and inspired.
the movement is so expressive and elegant, and the speed is absolutely perfect (v important to me). the levels are (mostly) easy and a delight to navigate. there’s a lot of really subtle and low-key tech-flexes happening, especially in the water levels (which are also somehow the best levels; go figure); i will never tire of surfing across those beautiful sine waves.
i’m pretty sad (but not really surprised) that it didn’t review as well as it should have. i’ve been talking to my housemate stella (maybe one day i can convert her to the sb life) about this, and we agreed that it was probably a case of “getting what you asked for” syndrome; it’s the thing that sonic fans have been wanting for years: a good and inspired 3D sonic, with authentic jank and bugs and everything! that’s how you know it’s the genuine article! and as a result people are way more critical of relatively minor (and, were this an actual sonic game, maybe even expected and appreciated) problems than they might otherwise be.
idk. i don’t usually care about how well a game does, but this was such a delight that i’d hate for future works to be pre-emptively made more conservative as a result of gamer opinions.
anyway game rules. it’s probably my goty.
oh i also played cape hideous and i don’t have much to say about it other than it’s probably the best thing ever made and everyone should play it.
videogames! pretty alright sometimes.