i laughed way too loud at the music punchline holy shit
this is a really good thread, i guess it’s going to get me to play star control 2 finally
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I love allegory. Because I love abstractions when they are stood up and puppeteered and presented as people and reveal all their flaws and falsehoods and from both sides,
and because I love allegory, I love Cubivore.
It adopts a chatty, faux-naive voice, which seems to have been popular among weirdo late-90s/early-2000s Japanese games: Love-de-Lic, the Choro Q games, Katamari Damacy; I’d consider Treasure’s shounen-spoof? (Bangai-O, as noted above) a predecessor of this style.
But it jabbers to contrast and deliberately distract from its exposed superstructure of gaminess (a gardening/evolution game, my absolute favorite niche) and blunt themes.
I latched onto this voice and I find myself mimicking it when I want to make something simpler, stronger, goofier. I ate the Raw-Meat.
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I gotta play this.
I should break this out, I still have the disc…although now that I don’t have a Wii I don’t actually have anything that can play the disc.
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Off the top of my head the only audio logs I ever really enjoyed were System Shock 1 and 2’s.
Barkley Gaiden and Katana Zero
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I’ve always been a fan of the minimal koan-like phrasing in early games like we dove into with that earlier Zelda discussion.
I’ve also always been kind of fascinated by the choice to make Quake 1’s deathmatch death messages homoerotic. I don’t think it was made for the right reasons, and I think in light of how toxic the online gaming community—especially the online FPS community—has become it really doesn’t play well. But back in 1996, I think it could be easily read as maybe having more in common with—to make an extreme analogy—Congress’ battle against Robert Mapplethorpe, rather than the misogyny of the infamous Daikatana print ad that was still lurking around the corner.
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Just want to say this slightly undersells Star Control’s writing. Yes, its pulp comedy space opera but its also pretty good just straight up space opera.
It creates a really cohesive world in a very efficient, parsimonious package: just dialog trees with very occasional other text.
Someone should write a book about this game.
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I do agree that it’s more than just comedy. Breaking the space-time continuum to find the Arilou ranks up there with the coolest story moments I’ve experienced in a game.
I remember having those long conversations with the Ur-Quan about their history and being totally rapt.
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The writing in Hollow Knight is generally good — solid prose, every character you meet is well-characterized even if there’s not much to them. The bestiary stands out, though. Each entry gives basic details the first time you kill an enemy type, but after meeting a certain kill count you get the additional “Hunter’s notes” from the intimidating giant mystery bug who gave you the bestiary. Off the top of my head i can’t think of another in-game bestiary written in a character voice, and i really like the Hunter’s comments on a lot of the entries
mfw when i see a chonky boi:
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It collates the main idea from like 15 different good sci-fi novels and then gives you a capsule taste of it with the story of each species (or pairs of species) in the game. It’s a really good format, because in most sci-fi the initial concept is the best part and there’s diminishing returns from expanding on it at novel length. And the framing exploration & Ur-Quan stories and cohesive style makes the package feel not fragmented at all somehow.
The wiki has a long list of influences: https://wiki.uqm.stack.nl/Influences_and_references
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My favorite entry is the maggot.
Another game with entries of this type that are worth reading is, of course, Katamari Damacy.
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Weapon: None
Fighting style: Football
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All downhill after Another World.
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