it’s hard to see her as anything but a person physically restrained by cables, honestly. she might be hostile but the world is a cruel place for her, a supergenius restrained by dipshits and the choices of her designers
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she’s also murdered countless testers before you so, impossible to say if she’s good or bad
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fuck it, lets talk about ico some more. did you know that you can do as I’ve done and draft narrative theories about its structural design based almost entirely on its fucking animations? and that these animations are in a PS2 game? the animation in your average PS2 game turns everyone into ghoulish dolls with sticks up their asses. characters in PS2 games are waddling army men with the plastic base sawed off. fucking today most video game characters are blobs of jello seared in the high fidelity hellfires of facial stubble and wispy bangs. they move like each limb has its own brain. ragdoll physics came out in the mid 2000s and that shit has a name because it was actually a fucking upgrade to the diseased toddlers stumbling around in our vidcons. where the fuck did fumito ueda come from? he’s basically hayao miyazaki in video game form, and he got there by being one of like 3 people in japan of a certain age who didn’t just copy and pretend.
in theory ico is more clumsy than sotc, because sotc is an elegant game that invented its own genre to do what it wanted to do, while ico grabbed on to prince of persia by way of tomb raider and deigned to resort to literal block puzzles. it’s horrifying. they may as well just put fucking signs down outside some of these castle rooms that said HERE’S THE VIDEO GAME PART. ueda must have been winging it, he didn’t know what the fuck he was doing. sony just found a giant pile of money in a drawer and let this guy gobble it up. sometimes video games are amazing. but anyway, ico is better than sotc, because it’s more introspective. it’s a little slower, a little more expressive. it’s paced better. and sotc just ain’t all that fun to play, especially after the first time. ico is breezy. it has a windmill. and by the time sotc came out I had already sat in oversaturated washed out fields staring at birds hoping around, you weren’t going to get me with that again in quite the same way.
have you heard this game’s soundtrack? it’s graceful. how often do you associate that word with video games? (right in this fucking chunk of the bracket we’ve got ikaruga, the only graceful video game ever made) half the time it sounds like king’s field, the other half chrono cross smashed into silent hill. it makes me want to cry.
portal is the same game as ico, only it’s clean, inventive and hokey instead of ethereal, traditional, and introspective. i bet they teach portal in every video game design program. they’d be wasting their time with ico
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I voted for Portal at first but decided to switch to Ico and now it just shows me as voting for both of them so take this post to be my official vote for Ico and discount my vote for Portal.
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this sounds way hornier than it actually is in practice
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there was a lot of fanart of that idea floating around back then
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oh yeah sorry i try to keep my horny levels at zero online so i forget that’s a thing. yeah it’s like, restrained like being tortured in the middle ages, not in a fun way.
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the best two tracks are briefing 2 and briefing 4 because they rely on that folk chanting I’m an absolute sucker for
But yes the music feels absolutely fitting for a game, the melodic content is simple but it is simple in service of a specific: the sensation of flight. The music, in place of words, serves as the narrative of the game.
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More SM64 propaganda:
One of my favourite memories of SM64 was at a house show where I lived (6 years ago (omg)). As is the ritual when a band finishes playing, everyone migrates upstairs or outside for a smoke until the next band goes on. Someone spotted my Wii in the living room and asked what games I had. One thing led to another and we started playing SM64 on the virtual console. They surrendered the controller 4 stars in because it was harder than they remembered and soon there were 15 or so stoned/drunk/just plain chillin’ DIY peeps flopped around the TV mesmorised. “This is so chill to just watch someone play who knows how to play.” This went on for about 20 minutes and then someone came in and announced that the last band had cancelled earlier in the night, so no more music. We kept hanging out around the TV, shooting the shit with intermittent requests to “go to the pyramid world” or “find that dinosaur monster thing”. Most of these people/friends like video games in theory, especially vibing in weird worlds with hip music, but the actual action, the dexterity and learning curve is a major put off. It felt good to basically act out SM64 as a movie for people to hangout with and socialise around. I don’t think Ikaruga would have had that effect, but also, maybe it’s down to the kinds of people watching. SM64 is more of a journey and choose-your-own-adventure though and that was a cool night. The end.
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ICO I had this repeating experience where I don’t know what to do and the game seemed impossible until it dawns on me and this it was very easy. I agree that the expressive elements are indeed beautiful and still stand out. It’s like a game that gets face acting while everyone else is still doing stage acting but on camera.
I found SOTC to be an unrestrained wonderland. There were so many unique places that reminded me of my best memories of hiking. So many little land details that struck me as both novel and believable. The actual fights were also a joy for allowing you so much latitude to balance cautious progression with huge leaps of faith. Landing the jump from wing tip to wing tip on the bird over the drowned castle stands out to me. Like Ico the fidelity of movement shines but I have more control options and opportunities.
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Regarding gender politics in ICO, I choose to read the relationship between Yorda and Ico as that of a mother being pulled through an amusement park by an over-excited child. I’m not sure that helps anything, but I think it is more accurate to what actually occurs onscreen than some sort of rescue-the-princess fantasy. I don’t know. To me, between this and Portal it’s a complete toss up. I voted for ICO but I may change my mind later.
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i think holding hands is feminist
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some difficult choices!!!
ffvi over dark souls because dark souls rules but demon’s is better. i read about ffvi for years in super play before finally getting to play it in zsnes. again i’m aware this is not a healthy way to engage with media but replaying it last month was a pleasant retreat into better days.
streets of rage 2 is a massive formative experience for me, the soundtrack was the first music i really liked as a babby but quake is something else… getting online around the same time it came out and discovering all the mods, maps and online competition was huge. 3A was a better comp game but quakeworld was brilliant and i don’t think there’s been anything as fast and raw since. the single player is also massively underrated. immediately knocked mario 64 off as best 3d platformer too!!!
outrun is pure pleasure but 2 is even better and doom is fuckin’ doom, i’ve replayed episode one regularly for like 25 years
might replay chrono trigger, feel borderline gaslit re: this game sometimes. as far as snes jarpegs go i’d sooner play ff4/5/6, dq3r or romasaga2, feel like the pacing is incredible until the final third where it just sort of falls apart
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the infamous ‘there’s a looming threat to the world so let’s all take a break and do a bunch of side stuff before the final battle’ pacing of chrono trigger’s last few hours is something definitely echoed in like… every jrpg. I feel like it stands out in chrono trigger more than say FF6 because the pacing in CT is so on point until then, whereas FF6 pacing is sloppy and all over the place the entire time
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At least in Chrono Trigger there literally isn’t an urgent threat since you can effectively control time by that point.
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that’s a valid point, but the lack of urgency is more a narrative problem than a logical one. JRPGs, particularly of the SNES vintage tend to be on-rails, and chrono trigger was an impressive instance of being on rails where following the rails to the next stop felt like an inevitability of narrative inertia rather than a constraint of the game designers’ imagination. The faltering pace of the final hours feels like the JRPG came to a halt and you just had a bunch of time to faff about before the game could finally reach its destination.
NB: I love Chrono Trigger and it got my vote, but if there’s anything that makes me who I am, it’s criticizing the things I love
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This is beyond The scope of this project but when I think about FFVI and CT I feel like “There has to be something that has done what they’ve done but better” in the last 25 years.
Radiata Historia got some heat but that game is definitely not Chrono Trigger. Cross Code is getting heat from mainstream-gaming but that evaporates once you actually look at the game. I know making something pinnacle of the form but 16-bit JRPG seems pretty hard to make great.
Then again anything past their release would have voice acting. Gah I was looking forward to replaying both in Nihongo soon. Stupid RSI.
ct is still The Best JRPG imo
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though speaking of timeslips i was surprisingly impressed by dq11
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yeah lol wow it didn’t occur to me until now but dqxi does a ct and a ffvi doesn’t it
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