Thinking about how Majora’s Mask is structured such that it not only allows but expects you to beat the major dungeon bosses multiple times across the whole playthrough.
Like, consider Snowdin: it has a decent number of things to do after you melt the snow, but the only way to achieve that is to beat Goht earlier in the loop. The game gives you all the affordances to do that immediately at the start of a loop: Possessing the right warp point and the right ocarina melody lets you warp to Snowhead Temple and open the entrance irrespective of any other quests, and possessing Goht’s Remains allows you to warp directly to the boss from the entry room. Yet, Goht itself is not obviously skippable, so you just have to do it again. This applies to basically every other dungeon boss (although the paucity of things to do in Ikana after beating Twinmold means that you don’t really have to fight them again ever).
The only thing that genuinely doesn’t need those bosses explicitly dead is summoning the giants on night 3.
not a game per se, but in this trashy chinese wuxia rom-com i’m watching on netflix, in the outro/credits they always put some sloppy drawings over screenshots of orig scenes in the show that significantly improve upon the shots (and add some clowning sub-context in the mix):
somewhat resembles another IP i have seen before, just cannot remember what that was, hmm~~~~~
…. yeah that speaks for itself, i guess!
i think about david jaffe wanting to fuck his videocard all the time
i bet he HATES ai for raising the price of his side pieces
Rayman 2 and Tonic Trouble didn’t release on the Japanese Nintendo Classics, only NA/EU, so I went to check to see if anyone was talking about it on X, the Everything App, which is sadly still Japan’s social media of choice.
I found a few people simply mentioning them but not really anyone talking about playing them.
Then I went on a deeper dive and found that no one has even written a Japanese Wikipedia page about Rayman. Is he that obscure in Japan? How bad were sales?
Clearly Rayman games did release in Japan, because we have this lovely box art for the PS1 port
And Nintendo published Legends on the Wii U in Japan.
I used to think Rayman got his name because his limbs were attached by invisible raybeams
easy mistake to make
A few weeks ago after finally milking the cyberpunk landmark serial experiments lain anime dry they’re finally releasing merch explicitly from the video game for which copies sell for a small fortune
https://h-messa.com/news/6925c0894f4ab60a82e78b95
And now today the new cyberpunk landmark Ghost In The Shell exhibit is ALSO doing merch for the video game that’s had nothing outside of a vinyl release after milking THEIR cow dry.
This means something.
IMPORTANT EDIT!!!:
This 13 second cutscene that plays in F Zero GX when you beat Chapter 6 (The long tunnel) that plays over a dude repeating “disco falcon” in a dance beat that’s not in the official OST.
I think the demise of physical game media is detrimental to games culture. having a tangible thing you can see and touch makes a difference, and yes it is actually a pain in the ass to buy and download a game on a console via the internet.
i mainly say this because game stores are so sad to look at. there are no interesting games for cheap anymore. there is no sense of discovery or serendipity. The remaining GameStops are all selling Funko pops and I guess if we have to have plastic artifacts related to culture it might as well be marginally functional.
this was prompted by walking into anchorages’ saddest game store and wondering why they’re still open if the only thing I thought about buying was the PS4 remake of Midevil.
Downstream of this is the end of game stores as a viable business. Most of them are already gone because one can’t make rent buying and selling used games.
i dunno why I’m sad about this.
I have complicated feelings about this but tbh most of them are that games never really earned a basis for being distinguished as physical media the way that film projection or analog hi-fi did. I think I’m a member of a very specific generation for whom software emulation has always been much more interesting than collecting rom cartridges or fpgas despite the fact that I attend an annual nitrate film festival, but I really do think the fact that there’s never been any such thing as analog distribution of games makes physical releases comparatively pointless
i’ve been cleaning up my rom and iso collection for the past three days using scene dats and automation tools and it’s more fun than owning chunks of plastic could ever give me
not only do i think this is true now, i think it’s been true in certain circumstances since the 90s.
if there was an english magazine like gamest, delivering lore and news and playing techniques for arcade games, western arcades would have lasted longer than they did, and would have been more successful during that time.
if sega had continued to be a presence in uk kids lives via sonic the comic adapting non-sonic games into back up strips through the saturn era, the saturn still wouldn’t have beat the playstation, but it would have done a lot better. (though the downfall of sonic the comic is a complicated phenomenon that has at least as much to do with the 1995 judge dredd movie as it does with sega’s notoriously poor decision making)
id be more keen on the continued existence of physical media if every disc and cartridge wasn’t slowly dying and i honestly don’t think maintaining physical replacements is worth it
one thing i’ve discovered over the years is if i really dig a title enough i probably will purchase some kind of celebratory merch related to
