Fuzzy Horribleness: Pervasive, Worrisome
These are the edited highlights of a three-way Twitter rant, simplified for flow and structure. Note that some of the features I lament here may well be present in the remake. I don’t really remember; it has been ages since I’ve played it, and I’m speaking to my vague, blurry memory of the game. If the remake retains the exploding eyeballs, which without checking it may well do, then… okay. Good job. How astute of you to notice. Here, bring this note to the old woman and she will give you a medal for your trouble.
Freezing Inferno: The Castlevania Adventure is not very good, but parts of it have a strange charm. When you play the patched version, I mean.
Me: I don’t know what the patched version is, but where the game falls down on mechanics it truly excels in atmosphere.
I’ll never argue that it’s a good game, exactly, but I love the feel of being in the game.
It has sort of a neat silent horror, crackly expressionist tone that feels just right. That’s sort of the tone I get from the best Game Boy games. Gargoyle’s Quest, Return of Samus. Silent horror.
It’s a curiously appropriate side-step, considering the Universal monster movie tone to Castlevania NES. Instead of Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, on the Game Boy we have Nosferatu. Sort of. Maybe a blurry print of Nosferatu, lacking a few intertitles and exposition scenes, played at the wrong speed.
It’s full of neat, weird ideas, some of which are creative workarounds to limitations; others… just odd. Had the game a billion times more checkpoints, I might call it playable. Still worth experiencing, though.
The Wii remake missed the boat by ignoring everything good and distinctive about the game along with the bad. The result is just about the most generic action-style Castlevania game ever, with the odd shout-out to TCA.
At least keep the game’s basic structure! Keep the ropes and the EXPLODING EYEBALLS and bounce-spit… things. Keep the weird upgrade path. Keep the most interesting setpieces. Keep the goddamned amazing soundtrack!
Why even call it a remake or reimaging if you’re going to throw away everything that defines the original?
ReBirth is like every shitty retroactive fan bullshit scenario of ignoring or “fixing” the oddball chapter to match. See the fan remakes of Metroid II, that try to make it more like Super Metroid. Or, well, Zero Mission. Except those had much more thought put into them, as misguided as the thought processes might have been.
In this case it’s more like some asshole looked at TCA and said, “That’s not a Castlevania game. But THIS is!” Then he ripped out random hunks of a half a dozen more-popular Castlevania games, and taped them together. I mean, of everything to replace, the music? Seriously? TCA has one of the best ever Castlevania soundtracks!
I mean. ReBirth is a polished videogame, if you’re looking for one of those. There are many out there. It just doesn’t have anything to say except, DUDE! THIS IS TOTALLY A CASTLEVANIA GAME! SEE! IT’S GOT ALL YOUR FAVORITE CASTLEVANIA MOVES AND MUSIC AND STUFF! IT’S ALL IN HERE! DUDE!
Fuckin’ gamer culture bullshit, that thing is. But it is a polished videogame, correctly made.
I mean, if you want to play that game, go play one of the games it’s tearing apart instead. Castlevania: Bloodlines is a good replacement. A near-era pastiche of the NES stuff, but weird. Or just play the NES games. Or Rondo of Blood.
Or… don’t. Go, feed the cynical meta-machine.
But… anyway. Yeah, I like The Castlevania Adventure.
Freezing Inferno: I remember being wowed by ReBirth, but I agree; there’s hardly a lick of any atmosphere.
Me: Or originality. Or purpose. Everything in there is just repurposed from an earlier, better game. And unlike, say, Gradius V it doesn’t have anything new to say about the elements. They’re there solely to say, LOOK! HERE THEY ARE AGAIN! SEE! IT’S TOTALLY A CASTLEVANIA GAME!
The remake falls into the trap of thinking a game is defined by its content rather than concept. Gradius V is a game built on concept. It strips away decades of cruft to dwell on one idea. I don’t think there are even any moai in the damned thing. Just setpieces built around Options. It spends a whole game trying to break down and define the series’ defining mechanic: Options.
That’s just about the best ever reason to revisit an old concept: to better explore its purpose. The worst reason is to dwell on and fetishize past notions for their own sake. HEY REMEMBER THIS?
That latter path is the one that has dragged game design down its own anus since 1985 or so.
Freezing Inferno: [So] Rebirth is basically a piece of dread NOSTALGIA in [your] eyes. It references things and incites memories of old Castlevania things in the name of lighting up those neurons that remember Castlevania… but it lacks the atmosphere.
Me: It’s not nostalgia per se that bothers me here, though I’m certainly no big fan of nostalgia in its own right. (Nostalgia is zombie thinking, out to devour the present and the future.) It’s more the regressive mindset of objective design — the idea that there’s some perfect game out there to be made; that design is all about doing things right, putting in all of the elements that people expect from a game. That’s as opposed to having a core idea, and then doing what is appropriate to conveying that idea to the player.
I’m being reductive. There was an idea to ReBirth: to “fix” Adventure and make it match all the other games. That, though, is the other thing that bothers me. It’s not much of an idea, but it’s troublesome in itself.
It’s one thing to look at the game and say, “Okay, what was it trying to do, and how did it fail in that?” and then to adapt all that, and try to accomplish those goals from a modern perspective. That’s cool and all.
It’s another thing to say, this sucks and it was wrong, because it didn’t match all of these other things. So let’s tear pieces off every surrounding game and fill the hole left by this unmentionable piece of shit.
That’s… I mean. It doesn’t affect me personally, but conceptually I find that kind of offensive. You know?
Freezing Inferno: Nostalgia in place of innovation. That’s the killer.
Me: I don’t even really know what innovation means. It’s nostalgia in place of a distinct idea or voice or theory. It’s like people who instead of thinking problems through rely on quoting famous, semi-respectable people. No, I don’t really care all that much what E.B. White said here, cool as he is. Think it through yourself.
By the same measure, all these quotes from other games — I’m sure they were great in their original context. How, though, do they apply to the present conversation (not our conversation here; you know, the design’s)?
In a good design, every decision, every game element comes from within the basic thesis of your design. It comes pragmatically out of what you’re trying to say with the game, and what that logistically may imply.
This stuff that ReBirth is grabbing from everywhere, by nature it’s not coming from within but from without. That right there is the crux of my irritation here. It’s a prime example of contemporary design vapidity.
ReBirth is a well-made game that has nothing to say, and borrows ideas to serve little but a priori expectations. In its own right I don’t mind it. If it didn’t claim to be a remade, improved version of another game, then… okay. Whatever. It would just be another generic, low-rent Castlevania game. With a series like this you’re going to repeat yourself and borrow from the past continually.
This, though, is more than a case of a series caught up in its own increasingly rigid myth. It’s an empty-headed piece of rote repetition that holds this formula as superior precisely because of its familiarity. In the process it discounts every idea that doesn’t fit the template, precisely because it doesn’t fit the template.
This is a shitty way to think about anything creative.
It’s an attempt to make an individual game fit the series, rather than to explore what the game has to say — which is both a pointless exercise and a tremendous missed opportunity to do something genuinely cool.
Deny the outliers. Sanitize the dissodants. As opposed to helping them better achieve their ambitions. It’s a kind of intellectual fascism.
There is a fine line between this mentality and all of the shit that women put up with from Gamers. There’s this enfranchisement of extremist reactionary entitlement bubbling below the surface of Gamer culture. It shows in subtle ways, and in totally disgusting ways, but it’s all the same process in the end.
This all is a big reason why I hate Gamer culture and why I’ve backed away from game writing as of late. I realize that it probably should be a reason to write even more, and even more infuriating pieces. But. Well. I just don’t feel the responsibility anymore.
John Thyer: Yeah, when you’re approaching every game as an imperfect permutation of some non-existent ideal, of course you’ll react with hostility to experiences outside the norm, often games by marginalize authors.
Like, Gone Home really isn’t that radical all things considered! But it still falls outside the closed mindset. And it’s ultimately what leads to the creator of Depression Quest being bombarded with rape and death threats.
Me: “Yeah, when you’re approaching every [woman/person] as an imperfect permutation of some non-existent ideal,”
It’s all the more raw and disturbing with games, compare to other media, as games are bottled perspectives. They’re not just a narrative that you follow. A game is a thesis about the way the world works. “If I do this,” you say, “then this happens.” Then you hand this to people, and let them see the world by your rules.
And in response, they get fucking furious and want to kill you.
Anyway, there’s something about mainstream game design that reinforces, rewards this way of thinking. It’s a small stimulus, but it feeds into this entitlement and pettiness, normalizing it as a thought process.
It’s not even the deeply ingrained violence that I’m talking about. It’s the Pavlov factor. Keep hitting your head on that button until you get the shiny reward. No means maybe, which means yes.
I’m being simplistic here regarding cause and effect, but there’s a fuzzy horribleness to game psychology — and that it is so pervasive is worrisome, especially when you consider the number of people who obsess over videogames, who make them their lives.
Because of the way that our brains work, everything that you do becomes a part of you, just a little bit. Learning is all about reinforcing those pathways between nodes. And the pathways that videogames reinforce… well. It’s not much of a mystery why gamer culture is host to such a population of irredeemable fucking monsters.
And that concludes my review of Castlevania: The Adventure ReBirth.