Wouldn’t a visual novel be linear in the short term and non-linear in the long term? Sort of? I don’t play VNs though so maybe this is missing the mark.
That also struck me. Again the branching structure… yeah, maybe.
Starfox? Darius? OutRun? Street Supremacy! A highway racing game in which you battle rival gangs by choosing which territories to conquer and defend. You’re basically making some very basic strategic decisions in-between races.
Open world games like GTA and Skyrim still offer very guided, linear experiences in the form of quests and main quests within their open world. In comparison, you have a greater influence on how the game plays out in Mount & Blade. I think it’s most apparent in terms of enemy AI. The bad guys in open world games are passive. Because they don’t know what to do. They can’t make strategic, long-term decisions. Open world games are passive world games. Nothing happens until you trigger it. Games with active opposition are less linear, because they can have much greater variation. A lot more can happen. Unforeseen things. Good AI is unpredictable. The most non-linear games are probably grand strategy games like Civilization. Too bad they lack the immersive real time action of open world games.
Btw, in trying to understand why I find games like Street Supremacy and Mount & Blade utterly addicting, I looked at their similarities and came up with a label. I call this favorite genre of mine “action games with dynamic campaigns”. Which is a mouth full, but I can’t think of anything shorter.
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Yeah, good stuff. I had been thinking of branching, but specific examples weren’t really presenting themselves to me. OutRun is an especially good one.
Plenty of strategy games have some kind of (usually pausable) realtime tactical battle element. For whatever reason, the strategic and tactical modes usually have an inverse amount of care put into them. On the one hand, the Total War series focuses so much on engaging tactical battles that its strategic mode suffers in comparison to most competitors; on the other you have something like Endless Space, which plays very much like Civ but whose “tactical battles” are almost entirely illusory and are more like a theater mode for your cool spaceships to shoot each other.
Notable here are the Paradox games, which feature pausable realtime at the strategic level. Not only does this hugely enhance realism, but it can also lend an almost action game-esque level tension to tightly-scheduled maneuvers e.g. during war.
The Goonies II – it’s really a different kind of game from the original The Goonies, though it clearly builds off of it. I’ve talked about the appeal of the original, where it’s level-based so it has forward momentum yet each level leaves you free to explore and find all of this hidden stuff. The Goonies II has a very different way of thinking.
Speaking very roughly it’s kind of like The Legend of Zelda or Simon’s Quest – or possibly more accurately, Dragon Slayer. I talked about the Dragon Slayer influence before, but here it gets more overt. I mean… I guess I’m mostly thinking of Faxanadu, which isn’t strictly a Dragon Slayer game, or even a Falcom one, but… never mind. A bit of that, crossed with Legacy of the Wizard, perhaps.
The thing is, The Goonies II is actually an action-adventure game in a sense that we can recognize today. There are elements that seem obtuse, or at least opaque, from a modern perspective – which I’ll get to in a moment – but it’s easy to compare it to an Igavania, for instance. You’ve got a big “castle” map (here it’s a hideout), which is conveniently mapped out for you on a grid, and which even has two “sides” like an Igarashi castle. Like, say, Simon’s Quest, the game doesn’t really put up a whole lot of resistance; the main hideout map is just an “overworld” connecting and interconnected by the “dungeons”.
But they’re not dungeons, in this case. They’re adventure rooms, connecting the action passages. Map or no map, the hideout isn’t one coherent structure in its own right; it’s a maze of small corridors and areas webbed together by these “adventure rooms” (some of which overtly say WELCOME HERE. THIS IS A WARP ZONE.).
Unlike the original The Goonies, here the hideout is almost completely devoid of secrets, and items. Monsters don’t even drop bonuses all that often, though there’s a greater variety when they do. Whereas the original game hides invisible trinkets everywhere for you to uncover, and is full of doors to bomb open, I think there’s exactly one place in The Goonies II where you can drop a bomb and open a secret door. The rest of the doors, you just open.
When you open the doors, you end up in Wizardry Land. In case you were in doubt of how much Japan liked that game, half of The Goonies II – the half where all of the adventuring happens, where you actively find and use nearly every item – takes place in ye olde ICOM village. The is the part of the game that I think perplexes modern players more than anything: the abrupt transition from (in effect) Castlevania to Shadowgate. But, I mean. It’s a thing that happens, in this era. Look at Phantasy Star, Golgo 13, Dr Chaos. Ambitious games changed mode often, and when they changed mode, it was usually to go all Wizardry.
Here, though, the structure seems to throw people for a loop more than usual. I think it’s because of how divorced the two elements are. There’s little in the way of adventuring in the action levels, except for finding the right door to enter – and there’s basically no action in the adventure levels. It feels incohrent to start with, before you even get to the narrative flow and the expectations the game seems to hold.
Boot the game up with no context, and it can be very difficult to understand what to do. The Legend of Zelda has little in the way of coherent direction, but intuitively you can pick up on the game’s signals well enough. If an area is too hard, maybe you should keep out until you can handle it better. As you unpeel the game and figure out what the items do, slowly you understand that there’s usually one major thing to do in each screen. Maybe there’s a secret item, maybe a secret passage. Maybe something not so secret. But, you know to look using the tools at your disposal.
In The Goonies II, because nearly all of the items are buried in the pure adventure segments, and when you do use them in the action segments they’re nearly always passive (like that top row in the Zelda inventory), it can feel like you’re wandering around with no purpose. It’s tempting to treat the weird old passageways behind the doors as nothing but connecting tunnels, a weird bit of design cruft that you have to push through but can safely ignore. So, it’s very easy to furrow your brow and say that the game sucks because you never know what to do and it won’t tell you.
Well. That’s not really true at all. If you’re accustomed to the Nintendo school of neoliberal design that arose with the SNES, then yes, it must be pretty confusing for a game to expect you to read between the lines and pick up on signals to guide yourself. There aren’t any unskippable text boxes popping up, instructing you what to do and watching over your shoulder as you do it, chiding you until you do exactly what the game instructs, then patting you on the head when you obey. Like Simon’s Quest, the game just lays out its own narrative flow and figures you’ll be methodical and will follow the clues, fill in the gaps.
The game unfolds quickly and elegantly if you just take the adventure segments as they come. Go into every door, and treat them like Zelda dungeons. Every room on the grid probably has One Thing about it. Maybe it has a hidden item, maybe a hidden passage. Use the tools that you have available to you, make a cursory inspection of each room, then move on. You start off with just the ability to knock on walls, so enter every door and knock on the back wall of every room. Items will start popping out of the woodwork. In short order you’ll have keys and bombs and molotov cocktails. In the first door you get a hammer, so if there’s no door on the back wall, and knocking doesn’t get you anywhere, try banging with that. There’s a good chance a door will appear. Once you get a ladder, start pounding on the ceilings and floors. You may well knock a hole through.
The game more or less hands out items as you need them. Just use the items that you have, and take things as they come, and the game will be over in around half an hour. It’s a really, really fast game – much faster than I remembered it. You don’t have to wander, looking for things to do. Just take what you get and apply it. There are a few things that it helps to remember, so that you can come back to them – but not many. You can probably count those moments on one hand. There are a few genuinely weird moments, like when you have to hit that old woman five times for her to drop a candle, but that’s nothing too unusual for a game of this vintage. And, again, there are probably fewer than five of those.
What I like about this era is that things had yet to become so codified and familiar. You have some regular grammar, like the running and jumping and attacking and power-ups, that existed in pieces before Miyamoto helped to nail it all home, but the overall structure is still up in the air. You don’t get people trying to make A Metroidvania; you have people trying to add depth of exploration into an action game, to take advantage of a fairly new juncture of technological and physical and temporal and psychological space, and finding their own solutions. If The Goonies II looks weird today, it is because things have become so familiar. We have so many preconceptions now of the way that things are Meant To Be, of what makes a good game because it’s what consensus has decided is the safest and most marketable, that when a game doesn’t hew to our expectations it’s easy to dismiss. They just didn’t do it right.
Well… no. There’s nothing to do right. Art and expression aren’t a technocracy, and any value judgments that you’re applying say more about your politics than about the work you’re judging. The Goonies II is doing something unusual, which in itself merits some level of respect. More than that, though, it’s implementing its ideas it with a level of confidence in its decisions and respect for the player that you don’t really see in games these days. It’s trying to hold an actual conversation, not just bark orders and watch as the player pushes the correct buttons. I’m not really at the point that I can say what the conversation entails or how much merit it may have in the end, but it is good conversation nonetheless – challenging and benevolent.
I think to some extent my experience with The Goonies II informs how I look at every game that I play. It closely inspired the first game that I ever made (which I designed on paper years before I had a chance to implement it). The first two Goonies and The Legend of Zelda and Simon’s Quest and Metroid make me inclined to read into the world presented to me, not just take it at face value. They cause me to look for a narrative history and context, a four-dimensional physical logic, in attempt to understand where I am and what I’m doing and why, and how everything around me got to be the way that it is – a process that a game like Riven rewards so heavily.
Anyway. Happy Monday.
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Come to think of it, all of this may be why I’ve always been so enchanted by Spelunker. It’s an almost impossible game to actually play, but I always want to. It feels like a world I want to explore, and that world seems quite similar to the one in The Goonies.
And the Famicom sequel sounds… worth looking into. Maybe?
http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/spelunker/spelunker2.htm
Also, Super Pitfall…
Kinda wish these posts were turned into an article or blog post. There’s a lot of good material here.
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You know, I used a Game Genie code that canceled out fall damage in Spelunker, and that just opened up a raft of other problems, as the game is so full of pits that you can’t climb out of. One wrong step at the very beginning, and you fall right down the elevator shaft and get stuck.
I feel like this game is waiting for a careful ROM hack, that tweaks the level design, the controls, the damage, and so forth – just a little bit in each case. And then you’d have a really charming little exploration game that you can actually play.
The arcade version takes away the fall damage and just stuns the character instead. That would be a decent compromise for a hack like this.
I could toss my portion of this stuff up on aderack.com, I guess. There’s good stuff by others, though – B_coma’s whole thing about Mickey Mousecapade, for instance.
Maybe this all could be reformatted in a logical way. Hmm.
I tell you what, there may be a selectbutton wiki page in this.
Ah, hell. Speaking of the wiki (in its insertcredit formation) I just realized why “diggers” like Lode Runner and Solomon’s Key and Penguin Land and what-have-you factor so heavily into my notions of 8-bit games. It must be because of all the time I spent in Lode Runner, making my own levels. That was my introduction to game design, really. I spent so much time on that stuff. And Wrecking Crew is also about smashing up the scenery, though it takes a slightly different form. I used to “save” my maps in both games by copying them out onto a blackboard.
I never really liked to play the prebuilt levels in either game, but I probably spent more time in the edit mode of each than I ever did with a regular game of that era.
(Builder is sort of overtly my tribute to the Lode Runner editor, crossed with Metroid glitches and more recent indie games like Love and some other stuff.)
Speaking of Ghost House, this looks interesting.
I also get the sense that Monster Party belongs in this discussion, but I can’t quite figure out how. It doesn’t really fit any of the mechanics or thematic concepts in these other games. But there’s something about it, that feels like it ties in on some level…
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Spectacular thread. Read it a whole bunch of times this year; just today I noticed more good stuff I hadn’t before. Hope this necro gives it another pass.
Monster Party does touch on a lot of weird NES ideas that atrophied and crumbled into dust. I always wanted to talk about it here.
To take off what’s been said about linearity, Monster Party hits a weird point on the Is-This-Game-Linear Gauge that I can’t think of a second example of. Let me explain. At great… great, length.
CHAPTER 1: THE TAO OF MONSTER PARTY
Monster Party has you collecting keys to leave themed levels, which possess a progression in difficulty and change up the main challenge each time: flat and open to get you used to the game, stacked corridor navigation, more precise platforming with pits, haunted house door mazes, narrow Icarus vertical climb… but in every level, you’ll be running, jumping, and whacking or lasering things as you walk past the occasional door. Levels do not have gates or ways to stop you from reaching the end on your first go.
But try to play it like Super Mario, run to the end bypassing enemies, and you won’t find a single key - just the knowledge that you can’t leave yet. Because Monster Party’s levels are really little SMB3 world maps, played from the side. The true draw of the game is hidden behind doors.
Doors always take you to a single screen room. In this room might be an item, or nothing, but mostly it will be a boss. And here is where the game starts KICKING ASS. (And it knows it - the game starts by proudly having its bosses parade, not in order, across its title, so it is kicking ass from its first second.)
Monster Party’s about meeting its bosses. There are handfuls of bosses in each stage, waiting in their own single-screen rooms behind a door. You don’t know anything about them before you visit them, so reaching a door and opening it up to see what’s inside is one of the game’s big draws for new players.
Because you can guarantee what you see inside will be fucking CRAZY. Each boss is unique (although a couple of stragglers will come back and scrap with you again), large and intimidating, and of course their quirky designs - bizarro-demons, Halloween archetypes, world mythology, folkloric and batshit insanity - all spitting inhuman, quotable, funny and weird threats - are so individual and strange that they solidify the game as a classic on their own in the minds of people who like that sort of thing.
So Monster Party has already made a name for itself with how passionately it lives up to its Monster Promise, enough to overcome the sort of unpleasant puny feeling you get when you actually play it, to keep people bringing it up forever.
But the context it’s spoken of is firmly “weird, interesting games”. And that’s because every aspect of it is suited to be PURE NES. The spirit of the NES, which Nintendo had little to no idea about, was hidden inside it and could be activated only by games with hidden secrets and mystery. In EVERY respect, this was a game of its time, so of its time it’s stuck there and exerts gravity on everything that reaches for it from the future.
CHAPTER 2: MONSTER PARTY ROCKS YOUR SHIT
The true great shining star within Monster Party is when it stops you in your tracks with a totally unexpected trick. Here’s a greatest hits:
The first and most perfect is that the second boss you can find is already dead. How ingenious is that? It’s some sort of horrifying giant spider, only ever seen in crumpled corpse form, with a little fly buzzing around it. Because every boss in the game has a dialogue box this one does too. It says SORRY, I’M DEAD.
Whoever made this the second thing you find in the boss rooms was a genius. The sheer insanity of finding a boss dead when you reach it, that early in the game, is enough to catapult it into the stratosphere for most people. I can’t emphasize enough what a good idea this is. The way MP swerves you on its first level is unmatched. Imagine you played this for the first time as a kid:
After merging with a gargoyle, murking burning goths, deflecting bubbles back at a prurient plant, meeting an enemy that’s just a pair of LEGS stuck in the ground naked and kicking, all in like the first minute of the game, just when you think you’ve understood what the flow’s gonna be, the second boss is already dead.
The other, also Perfect Trick is halfway through the first level. I recommend just playing the game yourself, but suffice to say, if you’re reading me write about Monster Party, you know what happens - you reach a landmark, the whole level takes a fucking 180, changes its own tileset in a flash of lightning, drops you into hell, you can never go back. It’s such a violent and evil aesthetic reversal that it does honestly kind of diminish the rest of the game. Because the rest of the levels never fully deliver on what the first promises, and you will never see anything quite like that again in your lifetime. It kind of diminishes the rest of every game.
The zombie lifeguard (?) boss. This is a group of zombies who don’t attack you. They dance, and they tell you to WATCH MY DANCE! And if you don’t just sit there and let them dance themselves out, if you attack them, you keep fighting. Take a break. Watch their dance. That’s how you win.
I can’t remember which one it is, but I read one of the later levels’ tracks uses an unusual time signature.
Personally, my favorite boss was the one in level 2 that’s just a giant hopping piece of breaded food. It changes into two OTHER foods every time you beat it. And somehow, as a kid, I always thought that this boss fight, taking place as it does in some little weedy meadow (?) with these weird raygun machines in the back (?!), made the absolute least sense and was therefore the best. Other bosses make more sense now, but to this day I still don’t understand what got somebody to put in a breaded shrimp as the boss, let alone a shrimp that becomes an onion ring, let alone a shrimp that becomes an onion ring and shish kebab and hangs out in a grassy field inside a sewer.
I also loved the wishing well who spits dinner plates.
CHAPTER 3: MONSTER PARTY IS OF ITS TIME
No, not ahead. Yes, unusual and yes, unfriendly and personable at once. It doesn’t have a big or small scope, but an odd one. All in all its exact blend of attitudes is NES PRIME - a type of atmosphere that could ONLY have come about with the perfect storm of existing game influence, outside inspiration, corporate approval and technological capacity. Its extremely high total NES PRIMEness arises from the individually exaggerated NES PRIMEnesses of both its inter-level design attitudes:
where you have like 8 levels, each of which ALMOST changes up the atmosphere of the controls and so feels quite different, plus the walls in the back screen (when the whole game is a cross section) sort of give you the feeling of entering another dimension when you use them. But in this case the other dimension is still a cross-section, but single-screen, which does in fact have a very different feeling. (In boss rooms “crossing the border” takes you to the level, and in the level you can never cross the border except into death by watery pit, you leave the stages to both interstitial scenes AND the End of the Game by taking doors.)
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And its level design attitudes:
aforementioned - somewhat unengaging executions of the main verbs without much dynamism or mystery - the floors are always static solids and these enemies will always walk back and forth in a line. The funny thing is that any apparently bad clunkiness at this point, although it prevents people from wanting to play it, doesn’t actually make the game worse. At this point making the “front game” uninteresting only empowers it. It only strengthens the insanity of the sprite designs, awkwardness of mazes, hauntingness of music etc. - all the parts that are unusually good just look better because it’s even stranger, then, that they would be where they are. Appreciating this is crucial to the highest level of appreciating old games. If you’re on select button you know something about this level of appreciation.
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And its setting, pure NES PRIME:
I’m not going to talk about “horror” or “Halloween” in the context of video games or even NES games because that is too big a subject for here. Although, I really, really want to. Games that had the sort of mystery this thread is talking about, if they weren’t superficially cutesy, a surprising amount of the time were superficially “friendly scary”. The friendly scary ends up hiding real scary. Look at this thread; you know what I’m talking about. Another game that was high on the NES PRIME horror setting checklist: Ghoul School. Nowadays we call it “sort of” a metroidvania, sort of survival horror, but the truth is is that it’s a part of the Hoppy Haunted House genre. I’m not including it as part of this thread, though. It’s a weird and enigmatic game, but its enigmas are a lot less hidden and maybe a lot more explicable as “a European guy made this and you’re not used to NES games a European made”. But in terms of sheer 90s’ kids’ media horror’s hodgepodge of ungodly huge bone piles, school hallways and flying psycho eyeballs, it gets full marks.
There is even a romhack (!!) with a NES PRIME horror to it: The Simpsons: Return of the Space Mutants. It’s a mashup of the Bart games with Swamp Thing (NES). Bart vs The World is NES PRIME HORROR too. They sure as hell don’t have the vibe this thread is looking for because they don’t even seem to be for humans.
Bats and vampires are icons of horror because it’s scary to get them up in your face, but they’re also icons of video games because they’re icons of horror, simple, goofy and have obvious weaknesses, BUT if you really hammer away at the “horror icons” and keep putting them together with things they’ll power up into something ugly, then combine it with anything that gives you the feeling that certain things should NOT be happening… then add that to the NES’s black backgrounds and the compulsorily clumsy writing and the alien hybrid-vibe of artificial repeating tiles with organic hand-drawn pixels… and the fact that you couldn’t straight up show a cross - but oh man, they got away with bloody skeletons and devils… maybe copy some traits from less otherworldly games to put you at your unease, and the contemporary inherited wisdom that telling a player what to do might make things over too soon… altogether you could get an ostensibly funtimes-for-kiddies product quite hostile and creepy, especially if you have the background in regular games to understand what’s wrong with it. This level of appreciating games hasn’t yet been fully conceptualized and capitalized on. It’s not the sort of bullet point an executive would have any idea how to incorporate into an existing design. I could do it, but nobody would pay me for it. (Enough.)
The story is just not of this planet. At first blush it’s the most generic possible. “good monster from monster planet asks a little kid to fight the bad monsters”. But in practice it’s not a generic story at all because it’s played completely straight, as if intentionally for strangeness, so that the player can’t help but ask - is there one good reason for this monster to be here talking to this kid? even the kid thinks it’s weird, why does he care so much about me, specifically, helping him if all I have is a baseball bat? - and then, when the game is over and Bert has proved himself to be cool and useful with flight and laser breath, you get dropped with a TRIPLE (!!!) twist ending that doesn’t just suggest the whole thing was some kind of hellish trick, but that Bert has control over Mark in his dreams, and that the events of the game will happen again, except this time even scarier. Defeating the king of the monsters only breaks down the narrative so much you can never “satisfactorily” explain it.
Perfect.
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And its overall cast, it owes to its past, and the way that contemporary games were bumped around and polished by legal teams and awkward translation constraints (time, size, quality):
Monster Party didn’t start life as “fight some weirdos, I guess”, it started life as “let’s make money referencing popular movies”. Its japanese title is Parody World: Monster Party. You were fighting Gremlins and Planets of the Apes and whatnot. That’s why the first boss is a giant plant - must be an Audrey II cutting!
The weird case of a game that was apparently made by Japanese people and then only saw release in America. Now there is dumped a Famicom prototype with some minor differences, the most important of course being the presence of licensed monsters. By the time it saw release, it had been trimmed lean and its wounds stuck with toilet paper. Now the extremely hostile story could reach its fever peak without the “inexplicable pre$ence” of less powerful imagery. And now it really was “fight some weirdos, I guess”. It had been leaning into its concept of “what movie monster will you see next?” so hard that it fell over and into the mud of “what bugshit shape can I possibly scrape these unusable movie monster parts into?”
Although I think the licensed monsters would’ve hurt the bizarre atmosphere (EXCEPT! they used the legged head from the Thing instead of a generic living giant spider, which is much creepier and better), certain aspects are superior in the prototype - the game can actually give you a different EMPTY. message for each round, and in the J version these messages get stranger and more hostile and interesting each time. This aspect was unfortunately missed out on - “EMPTY.” only works to be minimalist-scary once, but the J messages would have started off funny, passed through saying nothing, and eventually hit even scarier.
The prototype also has a different “wham line” to cap off the whole story. I can’t be sure which one I like better. The English one is “Let’s go again!” and the Japanese one is “よし、いくぞ。” “OK, let’s go.” The first one implies Bert is saying it quietly and gleefully, because he’s happy about what’s about to happen, which is scary enough. The second one comes across more like he really seriously wants to see Mark hurt and whether or not he takes pleasure from it it’s going to happen.
All in all Bert is an incredible character. What’s his fucking deal? Is he telling the truth, does he think he’s telling the truth but it was bullshit, is he lying to Mark because he wants it to be true, or is he controlling everything? Any of them could be the case. Is Monster Planet real? Is Earth real? The answer to both questions could be yes or no, and it wouldn’t even have an impact on what happens.
Perfect.
CHAPTER 4: A LOOK INTO THE MIND OF THE PIE DEVIL, OR, TURN BACK NOW
Finally, to emphasize the effects of removing the parody aspect, a little tale from when Monster Party was even stranger to me:
Because we only got the English version and collectors hoarded the prototype, the Japanese lines were unknown until a few years ago, so I grew up certain truths behind MP a mystery. When I was young I actually sent an email to Bandai about it on my first hotmail account, asking about some strange tiles in their NES game they published or developed like twenty years before. I didn’t get an answer. But I no longer need one from them.
In the first boss room, Audrey II has a hidden platform you can stand on, right next to his flowerpot. There was something there and they took it out by wiping its graphic.
And on the last boss of the first level, there’s background graphics. Except they got wiped too.
Now that the prototype is around I know what happened: The plant’s a reference to Audrey II, who enjoyed singing. The original design included a microphone and amp. That’s why it’s a plant and that’s why there are spotlights. That’s why it says HELLO! BABY! - it thinks of itself as a performer.
Of course, when you take out all these REASONS, you are left with a bare room containing a giant evil plant and tons of seedy looking lamps on it, spotlights that do nothing to the darkness and aren’t seen anywhere else. There’s a very small invisible platform letting you climb up on top of its flowerpot and it calls you BABY before trying to kill you.
All of that shit is bizarre! Nobody would intentionally design a boss encounter like that, certainly not a FIRST boss encounter like that; it could only have happened by failing to totally commit to a different design, and now I know. Many of the weirdest and best parts of old games were ugly pidgins born of ship-it-quick compromises between two normal person ideas. Now I know.
BUT WHEN I WAS A KID - this is it, the whole reason I think games are important - when I was a kid, I DIDN’T KNOW. I didn’t KNOW that there are no alien-brained twinkle-eyed games developers in faraway countries professionally invested in freaking out the world with unfathomable decisions. I didn’t KNOW that companies don’t WANT games to be this weird, that the whole thing was an accident, that all the shit I most appreciated was really someone else’s laziness, or incompetence, or bad luck, or pressure.
I grew up thinking that somewhere, somehow a team existed who would deliberately make Monster Party the way it was, the way I saw it, on purpose. And so I grew up into a total dick, continually disappointed in everyone else’s lack of creativity, lack of curiosity, continually disappointed in myself for failing to do anything to change it, who could never see anything for what it was but only the Monster Party it wasn’t. And now this is what I do - write it down in a place I know someone will give me likes.
And that’s the sad story of my life, although I’m really just talking about Monster Party.
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You’re gonna love this.
The Japanese version of Monster Party never quite made it to release, but it was basically complete. The original theme, that the US version only vaguely sticks to, was a parody of American horror movies. The cat boss started off as a Gremlin; the plant more closely resembled Audrey II.
So, the shrimp, onion ring boss. What was that? Well, check out the domes in the background. They very much resemble a key device in a certain Jeff Goldblum movie.
Yes, that’s right.
The Fry.
[I hadn’t yet made it through the whole post when I first replied. As may be obvious!]
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Why did I have to find this thread years late and when I was half asleep!? Wasn’t goonalike something I coined?
For the time being I’m just going to drop this probably now well known tidbit about Monster Party’s legs monster being a nod to the Inugami Clan.
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What this ties into, and I want to make sure I get into this in this context though I’ve ranted elsewhere before, is that when I was young I had no concept of a bad game. There were games that mystified me, awed me, made it clear they were above my understanding and probably meant for someone else. Someone older, someone wiser, more sophisticated. It’s not until people began to shout on the Internet that it occurred to me that some games maybe just weren’t made that well. And, I’m not certain that the standards people used by the time the Internet was there to scream on are necessarily that applicable.
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Oh my god
Oh my goooooooooooooooo
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On the note about “bad games,” Friday the 13th has a reputation as terrible, but it’s always struck me both as beyond my understanding and intriguing. It’s clearly a deliberate game that a lot of thought went into, as its design is so odd. And in many ways, similar to the games in this thread. This clip goes into a bunch of detail, to unravel just what the game’s deal is.
It’s by Atlus, first off, which should give some clues. Because it plays like a Japanese horror movie, which is kind of one of Atlus’ aesthetics. As its hybrid adventure styling.
Most art, unless it does harm or is completely cynical, I have trouble writing off. It means more to me to fry to find its way of thinking than to feel big by passing judgment. And I think some of the least well-regarded works have the most to say if you figure out their perspective. Maybe I’m projecting a little, but, yeah.
So this video clicked several things, and I’m semi-eager to give that game another shot. I think if you put Atlus on the title screen and did a visual swap, putting some Japanese mythical demon in place of Jason and replacing the cabins with traditional Japanese houses in the woods, people might look at it very differently.
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I’ve always thought this was a game that deserved a spiritual successor
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