I feel like “metroidvania” started becoming a term at around the same time stylish men were being called “metrosexual” and so “metrovania” makes me just think “very stylish Castlevania”
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I have only ever pronounced it metrovania and I have never been called out. I honestly didn’t realize I was wrong until right this second.
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Fuck a -vania tbh
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Particularly as the biggest problem with most Metrovanias is they try to be as heavy handed with the gating as SNES-era Nintendo in their level design and that’s not really something you can pull off satisfyingly other than at the level of super metroid itself, which for all their flaws is something that Igavanias generally knew better than to do
So it’s seldom accurate!!!
Aren’t Metroidvanias just GravityZeldas? AdventureMarios?
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Yeah I mean I would rather play super metroid or la mulana than pretty much any castlevania other than maybe circle (which benefited a lot from the time and platform of its release) or the first NES one (which is something else mostly) but at least pretty much all of them still thought of themselves primarily as action games and don’t let “platform you can’t reach yet” stand in for level design the way that most copycat Nintendo stuff does
Knytt Stories is the best metroidvania fight me
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I will forever be bothered by game genre titles because we will never get our shit together as a subculture
even the alternative of “metroventure” strikes me as hard to take seriously (not that a metroid has ever aimed for criterion collection kind of artsiness)
the word metroidvania just makes me break out in hives
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Knytt Stories was probably the most interesting engagement the indie community ever had with the genre!
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“Metroidvania” is an ugly term, but every proposed substitute is just miserable.
At least it still conveys something like the original intended meaning, unlike “roguelike.”
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but it doesn’t have any guns or whips so i thought it would be a more controversial pick
~roguevania~
Akumajo Backtracula
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somebody (specifically the creator of the excellent game+architecture zine Heterotopias (the first three issues of which are on sale right now for $6 as a 1-year anniversary bundle)) wrote what I was thinking so I don’t have to:
The result is a kind of particularity that feels totally estranged from the original game. While Shadow of the Colossus, in its washed-out, blur and bloom-laden original form felt like it was describing the sense of a place, its remake is describing the place itself. There’s something unshakeable about its level of detail, a feeling of exactitude that is totally different. When I see a rock face in the Shadow of the Colossus remake I am looking at a particular rock face, a particular rock, a particular scraggly shrub. Their detail solidifies them into distinct objects in a way that the hazy props the original game never did. Together they assemble what is an undeniably particular landscape, one that might even have a 1:1 match in reality. In comparison, the original’s hazy, grassy plains felt like a dream, something half-forgotten, already lost.
Bonus Gormenghast reference inside!
An observation I have become fanatical about in recent years:
That’s the strange thing about fidelity; that ultimately it undoes what it seeks to represent. The more that is described, the more that is defined about an image, the more settled it is.
Honestly we should know this in the history of visual art going back at least to J.M. Turner but games are nothing if not disconnected from great chunks of culture.
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yeah!!!
this is also a real good illustration of why I also feel very strongly that people who don’t take emulation seriously (either because they feel weird about piracy or because they hate or are daunted by computers, I’m not aware of any other reason) almost can’t honestly engage with the medium with any depth. I’m obviously kind of an extreme case as I do adjacent stuff for a living (albeit largely because game emulation was accessible to me as a kid) but I don’t even consider myself a stickler for authenticity (remember, I’m the super 2xsai fan) so much as I find these recreations really beyond the pale.
this is a significant part of why a) I’d like emulation to be as accessible as possible, because I do think it’s absolutely crucial to a dialogue that doesn’t just paper over history, and even though I am admittedly offended by people who would sooner buy remakes in the service of having all the software one vendor will sanction on a single consumer electronics device, I get that I’m asking a lot of some people, and b) I’m always very skeptical of archivists who gloss over the work of hobbyists that’s able to dodge intellectual property issues to some extent in the first place.
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Is it possible for archivists to recognize these things, though? Are they risking opening themselves up to legal contamination by recognizing these things? Is it something they need to fight for (as it seems tech companies have currently stalemated copyright fights, we may be able to unlock this)?
in my experience most of them are being weenies about the letter of the law and in practice no one gives a fuck because there’s so little cross-sector overlap; in cases where there is actually will to do justice to the material, permission is often given when sought:
(not to throw all archivists under the bus though, at mpow we’ve been pretty progressive about adopting a risk evaluation framework to release of materials for which the copyright is in a grey area, which is a massive number of materials, and the risk is almost always correctly evaluated as minimal)
So are the design bozos who do that zine though.
The fidelity thing is such a typical ‘good art’ opinion that is so easy to find cases against. Making art isn’t some solvable problem.
I’m so tired of all these people writing on games who think they’re art critics, but talk about art like they’re art historians and have no actual engagement with it as it is now.
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I don’t think that right now but I’d love to hear arguments.
Isn’t most criticism reacting against dominant ideologies of the day?
Are there specific articles you have criticisms of, or specific complaints about the project itself?