after three decades, simple things are starting to make sense to me
(as they will do, eventually)
it differs per move per character, so you really need to spend time getting to know a character’s eccentricities,
but generally normal moves will combo across or up move-strengths, but not down
so, like
light kick to medium kick or light to strong or medium to strong—but not strong back to medium or medium back to light, right
and to link them cleanly, generally the time to hit the button for the next move is after the first move connects but before your animation returns you to neutral
so this clip, it’s just a calm down-the-alphabet of lp, lk, mp, mk, hp, hk, leading into her overpowered antiair move once the final normal move launches the opponent
top-to-bottom, left-to right
light, light, medium, medium, heavy, heavy, special move
light leads to light leads to medium leads to medium leads to heavy leads to heavy leads to whatever special move works and makes sense
using this understanding in context is another kettle of cats, but thus is life
it’s funny, i keep saying how much more street fighter 6 feels like an snk or a sega game than what i associate with capcom
and city of the wolves—though the thematic lineage is clear, maybe real bout more than mark of the wolves, the physical vibe is… off, somehow, and in some ways reminds me more of cps1/2-era capcom than mvs-era snk
the play dynamics have more of those “mean” teeth that i used to avoid so much, in favor of snk’s more slippery texture and freewheeling dynamics
every move has such a narrow input window, such a huge punish window, and 2/3 the range i expect; every mistake is so costly yet so difficult to avoid
although in theory cotw retains much of that snk mobility, in practice it feels way more nailed-down and confrontational than sf6; it’s harder to get the opponent to fuck off and give you space to figure things out
the stress of which exacerbates the narrow margin of error to decisions and inputs
it’s kind of discouraging to engage with, like it shuts down every attempt to hold a conversation and tells you to mind your business (says the famous social butterfly azurelore), compared to the transparency and flexibility and radical effort toward diverse and confident inclusion practiced by sf6
none of this is necessarily bad; it’s just kind of alienating by comparison, toward anyone who falls outside a kind of narrow specific attitude about what sort of conversation they want to entertain
and that’s a conversation i personally am not hard-coded to entertain with ease or enthusiasm
there’s much about cotw that does fascinate me, that feeds the parts of me that push me toward the media that i enjoy
it’s just, i find it a little frustrating that the central design of the thing seems to keep looking at me oddly and asking what i’m doing there, like i strayed into the wrong turf
his character is downbeat, soft-spoken, almost resigned. gently sardonic sense of humor. matter-of-fact about his occupation. generally open and honest and respectful to others, when he’s not killing them.
did he and preecha go to school together?
at a glance, everything about him says “insufferable edgelord,” but he seems like an okay, relatively well-adjusted guy aside from the murders.
doesn’t hurt that maybe he has the best english-language voice acting in the game, ahead of even billy and terry and rock
those four in particular are really killing it here
it’s curious how reasonable everyone is in this game. there’s conflict, but there aren’t really any bad guys beyond inner demons and lingering ghosts of the past
and mr. big, i guess, whose petty shittiness put two games’ worth of story in motion, but his role is sidelined for the most part
it’s mostly just a bunch of people being thoughtful and melancholy at each other, while treating each other with respect
kind of like sonic adventure (a game i’m starting to reference as a touchstone for a certain vibe as much as i do the original release of riven)
there’s this sadness throughout
it’s also very clear to me that mr big, the closest thing to a real antagonist in this web of fates, was supposed to be in the base roster until very very close to release,
while dong hwan was going to be held back as dlc for the first season
and that ronaldo was also crammed in at the last minute
i don’t know what possessed them to swap big for dong
(big dong big dong big dong)
but dong is just not prepared here. no home stage (same as ronaldo), one of the last characters credited, and—i thought initially, missing from the intro, but no, he’s right there…
you see that explosion of silhouettes over the transition with the jin scrolls?
dong is actually the first character we see in the game, beyond terry and geese—or at least, the shape of him,
followed by the darkened forms of joe, andy, ken, and chun—
five extra mystery characters, clearly all dlc
(with fuckin ronaldo “fuck-you” tacked onto the end of the sequence, as if edited in after they thought the animation was all locked down—and even then with some confusion as to whether he would be dlc or not, like his fate was in flux even as they scrambled to shoehorn him in)
by comparison ganacci is pretty securely established, seemingly a later addition but one they had more time and will to work into events as a minor side character—and to allot a spotlight beat with some actual animation alongside everyone else, not just an unflattering static portrait jump-scare
unlike mr. big, who is conspicuous by his absence despite playing such a pivotal role, dong hwan really doesn’t have much to do in the story—
which makes sense if he wasn’t meant to be on the base roster, but part of a first dose of “oh, also these guys” alongside the likes of andy and joe
i’m further guessing that jae hoon was planned to lead a second season of dlc, and freeman a third—going along with their stated commitment to do at least three seasons. each of the three narratively less-important motw characters would have gotten their own little party as they joined the gang.
they announced dong just three days before halloween, a month after the first vague weird cr7 teaser, which in turn was two days after they announced the street fighter collab—which we know they leapt to announce before the ink was dry, lest details of the deal leak before they could do anything
a month earlier than that, in late august, they loudly announced (alongside mai) a 17-character base roster with five dlc characters, sounding like they were confident and had things finalized and were now just focused in on cranking through the last stages of development to meet a meetable deadline
so it looks like last october, six months before the game had to be ready to ship, is when things started to shift around
after tweaking, the intro animation must have been locked in by early october, under the assumption that the base cast was settled aside from maybe a question mark over ronaldo
so what happened in those few weeks to make them suddenly bump up dong and announce him next?
they had rapidly announced eleven of the seventeen base characters, then there was a long gap after mai in august—with the collabs teased halfway through—before suddenly dong was in, and no longer as dlc
clearly ganacci was already quietly happening before the shakeup, though i’m gonna guess he was the final character settled on in the “original” version of the game as it sat prior to late september.
so by late september that leaves gato, kain, ganacci, hokutomaru, and mr. big to finalize by april
realistically they had six months left before they had to tidy things up for initial release, and five characters they still needed to complete—with a single character taking about two months to finish, drawing board to locked code.
of course this isn’t sequential, and they’re spinning many plates.
before late september, i’m guessing the devs felt despite the late-ish addition of ganacci they had things pretty well under control; they knew what work they had left, and had it all scheduled out and allocated and accounted for
then after the collab announcements, it would seem, late-stage chaos
it strongly appears to me, over just a few weeks there was this abrupt pressure to make ronaldo happen for launch if they could, which they didn’t have room to worry about this close to release with this much still left to complete.
so given what they had already promised, they had to reprioritize.
i think they realized that to add this fucker at this point meant they needed to look at what was now physically possible to do, to meet the letter of what they had publicly committed to.
mr. big, i guess, they had yet to really work on much—but for whatever reason, dong was closer to complete.
like, maybe someone was getting a head start on the dlc characters since they thought they knew how much time and work they had left. whatever the reason, he happened to be further along than others so they must have chosen to finish him up next because they had no more time to fuck around
realistically they needed to cut a character to squeeze in this surprise soccer fucker, but they couldn’t cut a character because they had just announced how many characters the game would have.
so they must have stealth-cut mr. big right then, and pushed back everything else that wasn’t crucial.
by mid-february—four-and-a-half months after chaos hit—it feels like they had reached a new security over what they could crank out before an april launch, as they stopped vaguely gesturing at blank spaces and publicly committed to the full season 1 dlc roster, same day as they announced kain.
a month later they first showed off ronaldo’s rough-as-fuck make-do character model, so basically by mid-february they must have concluded that, yeah, they technically can fit this guy in without making themselves into liars about either the release date or number of playable characters at launch.
notably, after dong hwan was rushed down the assembly line without time to figure out a custom stage or anything, the last few characters took absolute ages to announce, almost like the work pipeline devoted to the rest of the game as planned had been halved since october.
gato trailer around christmas, kain about two months later, and hokutomaru only two weeks before launch, within days of salvatore ganacci 😬
assuming they were contractually required to have ganacci complete for launch, it must have been up in the air for a hot minute who else they could manage.
like, maybe it wasn’t immediately clear that mr. big in particular had to go, since it looks like gato, kain, and hoku were all a ways off when the bomb dropped in late september, early october. maybe it was simply obvious that raw numbers were now more important than specifically who made the cut.
so with dong incidentally far enough along for them to rush him out the door, i expect that meant a choice on which of the other planned four was the right balance of less immediately crucial and in need of the most work.
gato is probably the least important—but also probably needed the least work.
that narrows it down to kain, hoku, and mr. big. kain is kind of difficult to manage without here, and though big is central to everything that’s going on in the story, i imagine hoku was just deemed more appealing in a direct comparison, and probably had at least some work already in progress.
i think it’s probable the final decision on which of hokutomaru and mr. big they ultimately would focus on came sometime between finishing up gato around christmas, and the season 1 dlc announcement that came alongside kain.
well, obviously before the latter—but i get the sense, not that far before
terry bogard may be the only main character of any fighting game whom i’ll gladly spend a significant time playing.
ryu? lol, no. akira yui? the kazamas, sophitia alexandra, kasumi mugen tenshin, haohmaru, amongst my last choices.
(weirdly, morrigan isn’t the central darkstalker until game 3. 🦇🤓)
even kyo kusanagi, i enjoy his shitty personality and the bleary antagonism he bounces off everyone in his life—iori, chizuru, shingo, saisyu, even yuki. it’s fun for a long-suffering central character to actually be a total asshole who needs to be dragged into doing anything that could look heroic.
i like how drastically his moveset and play archetype have changed over time. i kind of like the overly complicated, distinctive core of his move list since 1996. i like his changing outfits. the musical evolution of “esaka” is one of my very favorite Video Game Things to go back and fuss over .
i like how deep kyo’s original actor masahiro nonaka’s voice slowly grew, year after year. i liked seeing his character teeter toward totally losing himself over the course of the nests saga; how he began to borrow iori’s moves, a darkness would fall across his face, and his animations grew alarming
as with morrigan and darkstalkers, kyo’s popularity has long been eclipsed by his rival iori—and iori is my precious grumpy snarling gumdrop, who first got me interested in kof, snk, and fighting games in general back in the neogeo pocket/dreamcast days. i absolutely will play iori.
but kyo? ih. 🤷🏻♀️
i’m all over his successor kaydash, and take a fae sort of delight in ash crimson, both of whom technically count as central characters even as kyo, like ryu, remains squarely in the middle of things, anchoring each new era in familiarity and kind of taking the steam away from whoever it up for lead
it’s like, “main character energy” tends to exert on me this unconscious magnetic repulsion. why on sub-con would i pick mario, when the princess and toad are *right frickin there*, you know.
it’s not a thing i think about or intend; it’s just, my mind bounces right off any sort of guided decision.
terry, though?
he’s terry. he’s the guy. why would i not want to hang with such a good bro? one with such a strange yet effective playstyle, at that.
he’s just wander around, doing his thing, and we can come along if we want. or not. no biggie.
mentally i tend to lump in the first season of sf6 dlc with the starting roster, in part because i didn’t pick up the game until after ed hit; in part, because they are all part of the original plan for the game
like, capcom had only announced four characters when the other 18 leaked in one lump
structurally much of the base game is clearly built around the knowledge that at least rashid, aki, and ed are meant to be there—they’re just delayed a bit, for reasons
same as kofxv with its first season, or what’s happening with cotw, talking about 22 base characters—albeit five of them being dlc
emotionally the sf6 roster also kinda feels weird without the energy of rashid, aki, and ed—they feel like core characters as much as the other seven new guys, plus juri, deejay, and cammy
i get the sense that, like kofxv, they lightly carved out the least-crucial characters to hit the launch date
i mean, akuma is easy to push back because of the way he’s always served as a sort of elite post-game bonus element—but i can see figuring they needed all eight original world warriors on day one as a security blanket, and wanting to show off as many of their new creations as possible…
so it’s mostly that zone between sfii:tww and the new cast, where there was room to trim
i can see keeping in cammy and deejay again for familiarity, even as they have been totally redesigned—leaving just akuma and the three select sfiv-v characters
and then i can see swapping out aki for juri
like, if we’re talking an 18-character launch roster, and feel constrained to use eight of those slots on the sfii cast in order to reassure the easily-stressed and elder Gamers, to balance off and provide symmetry for the eight new guys, that just leaves two other “wild card” slots—which, if we go with the super sfii guys again serve to defer to relative familiarity, while showcasing the game’s ability to make the old altogether new again
i can then see that same totally justified “we need people to accept this immediately” impulse to pivot with a frown and say, “okay, juri is probably our single most popular character of the last 20 years; how can we squeeze her in at launch?”
and if we’re gonna tinker with the symmetry to make sure foot-girl is there on day one, then aki makes a natural sacrifice. even if she’s an important new character, there’s so much conceptual overlap, right?
like, juri has always been dlc until now and i can see how at first thought she likely was a strong candidate to hold back along with akuma and the two sfv characters—but she’s just that strong a draw, swapping her into the launch roster makes that much stronger a first impression and sales pitch
anyway, the season 1 dlc is clearly all scrambled up in the initial development of the game. it’s not extraneous tacked-on content, it’s the rest of the game as originally planned.
season 2 is where shit starts to get wild, as they start to build and riff off the now-established base
there’s this clear “act break” of sorts between [launch+s1] and s2, and the energy is so different, so much more confident as of last summer, just a few months after i finally got on-board
it’s almost like a soft reboot of a now-proven success, restating the original pitch with new flair and spark
so, long way of saying, i tend to kinda forget that rashid, ed, and aki technically aren’t launch roster. since they are so clearly of a part with the rest of the game and elements of its *core* roster. it’s just, part of that base core had to be held back a bit to get the game out the door at all 🤷🏻♀️
The King of Fighters has always carved out a queer-friendly space. It has an enormous cast, defined more than anything by personality dynamics—representing a huge array of gender expressions and unconventional relationships. The team dynamics in this series are akin to found families. With a few exceptions, no one in KoF is ever fighting alone. Personal support systems are the norm.
Of the fourteen main games in the series, The King of Fighters 2001 is easily the queerest—with ’99 as closest runner-up. (That whole K’/Krizalid storyline sure is something!) Those bookends to the NESTS saga (the second story arc in the series, with KoF 2000 in the center) are the most I-don’t-give-a-fuck, expressive chapters in the series, unconcerned with expectations, with fitting into forms. Instead they spend their time grasping and scraping the margins to say what they feel they have to say, even if it comes off as broken or ugly or annoying.
The preceding Orochi saga had been, to a large extent, about living up to roles and expectations foretold centuries before one was even born. There are queer dynamics within that, but what’s astounding about the NESTS arc is how it dumps the rest and redoubles its attention on those elements.
There is something so essentially queer about the NESTS saga, coming up as it does to shred everything that came before, oust the main character, and refocus the series on this new sci-fi story about finding identity that’s been systemically stolen.
The team dynamics, which define KoF as a sereies, becomes all the stronger in this period, with larger teams allowing a more complete and varied support system and more potentials for character interaction. Part of the story progress is watching the likes of K’ slowly assemble his crew—which takes almost-full form with 2001.
All of the principle cast, during the NESTS years—it’s about discovering who they really are apart from how everyone else views them and all the burdens they carry. Even Kyo and Iori getting dumped from the burden of series leads for a while to focus on each other fits this.
2001 is the least fuckful of the trilogy, both in its astounding-it-even-got-made design and its story and aesthetics. It is what it is. The characters are embracing who they are, the good and the bad. The art isn’t trying for gloss: it’s as straight-up expressive as it’s been. I am on record for feeling the most affinity with this game, out of all of them. I think I’m developing a better handle on why.
King, the most stable presence in the franchise—so named for her gender ambiguity in her first role.
Also, on the EDM/queerness axis, the NESTS era has the best music in the series. Which is saying something, considering the series is known for its music almost as much as Castlevania or Mega Man or Sonic. Into which I stubbornly rope the 2001 AST, yes:
Though given their polish, ’99 and 2000 are a bit of an easier argument:
I mean. If you’re gonna have a queer-coded sci-fi revamp, might as well go full EDM, right?
And Christ, if we’re talking about associated emotional issues, the level of angst the series rises to in this arc:
Jeremy Parish muses over the NES ports of SNK’s Athena and Taito’s Arkanoid
Watching Jeremy Parish doing his best to defend a game he clearly does not enjoy, a bunch of things are clicking into place for me, suddenly, about the role of performance and execution in the allistic mind, compared to theory and intent.
For most people, what you mean to do, have to say, is all well and good—but even at their most generous they have trouble caring all that much unless it’s presented to them on their own terms. They almost seem to take personal offense when someone doesn’t bend over backwards to predict what they want and have it all ready and waiting, fixed exactly the way they know they like it best, before they arrive.
Whereas to my mind at least, polish is… fine? Like, it can be a nice last thing to help with clarity of vision. But what I’m most interested in is what the message is, what someone has to say. I don’t tend to assume that things are about me, for me, because nothing ever is.
The things that give me life are the most developed, interesting, original visions—which often are difficult to communicate and need some level of intent engagement. If that’s not there, and all I see is polish, it’s, there’s nothing to engage with. I don’t see the point at all.
Athena I find an endlessly fascinating game, in part because it’s so impenetrable. There’s so much going on here, so much I’ll maybe never fully understand, and that’s amazing to me. Arkanoid is also-good, but that’s almost entirely because of its vision. The clarity of its execution does little to improve communication of its vision, so it doesn’t really fuss me one way or another—except to make me nod and say, oh, yeah, I get it; interesting. I find myself thinking about it far less, ergo it occupies less space in my mind. With the game taking up less space, inspiring fewer synapses to take root, it gives me less fuel for general Understanding of Stuff. Less of a sense of wonder. Less of a sense of something bigger, even than the game’s own ideas. (Again, though, Arkanoid is pretty wonderful itself.)
And, you know. In the exceedingly rare instance when something does appear to cater to me, it rankles the heck out of my suspicions. And often with good reason. It’s almost always toying with me, and I almost always feel used at the end of the exchange.
The works that are all head-down and almost totally unconcerned with how they come off to other people because they’re so focused on exploring a notion that they’ve hit on, those are the most absolutely exciting things, and I just wanna be friends with them.
Granted, Micronics (the one-bedroom company that handled the notorious NES ports of several early Capcom and SNK titles) is awful. No way I’m gonna defend their coding. But I don’t see what that has to do with the ideas at play; it’s just another systemic barrier. Like, to me there’s a big difference between dismissing Athena, the game, and dismissing Micronics’ coding on Athena. Yeah, it’s an absolutely barfy port—but enough about that; what’s going on with the game is…
Anyway. This mode of engagement here, this allistic impatience with the strange and expectation for service, it ties into issues of abuse in past relationships, and into observations about privilege and expectations about media and shaping of information—like how white cishet men go apeshit when things aren’t specifically made for them. This all also further ties queerness to neurodivergence…
There are degrees to everything, of course. Parish is behaving entirely reasonable in this video, and makes some sincere effort to engage with the merits and ways-of-thought of even the more inscrutable of the two games. But I think in the clear effort that he shows to be fair, he kinda illustrates the issue.
Like, the dynamics become very clear: Athena is a strange game that doesn’t make much of an effort to explain itself, and it takes a supreme amount of patience for him to cut through that and engage with its perspective as well as he can. And he’s clearly not thrilled with the task.
To put maybe too fine a point on it, the attitude that Athena receives in this video, it’s sorta, well, it’s the best I feel I usually can hope for in treatment myself, from most people. And this level of patience is pretty uncommon, because of the effort it takes. Most people aren’t used to having to do this all the time.
Being autistic, of course, I am! It’s the only way I understand anyfuckingthing. And so if I’m gonna put the same effort into just comprehending-at-all a glossy surface with limbo behind it as I do a rusty shell filled with wonder and mystery, I’m gonna invest my energy where it’ll do me the most good.
(I’ve always been drawn to archaeology and lost information that has to be puzzled together. The thing that really got me into Doctor Who, after multiple efforts to engage me, was the return of “The Lion” in 1999 and stumbling into the whole missing episode situation.)
There’s a certain magic to puzzles. If by the act of engaging with a thing I understand it into existence, and am able to help communicate its ideas more widely, I feel like I’ve made the world a little better. Like all of the supreme effort it takes just to live has a purpose.
Which I guess also explains the kinds of writing I’ve done over the years…
In what spare time I have, I’ve been hacking away at some neglected Master System games on my Power Base Converted model-1 Sega Genesis. A brief, and perhaps obvious series of conclusions:
The best Alex Kidd game? Alex Kidd in Shinobi World.
The best Shinobi game? Alex Kidd in Shinobi World.
The best Master System game? Alex Kidd in Shinobi World.
This game is… not really even a satire; it’s basically an earnest attempt at a cute chibi-style revisitation of the Master System port of the original Shinobi, in the style of Mighty Final Fight or Kid Dracula or the like. It’s from that era, you know.
The game is very pretty — increasingly so as it goes along — and has a great soundtrack, which involves dramatically shifted permutations of pieces from the original Shinobi. You know how R-Type has this one motif that keeps developing and exploring from different angles, leading to a sense of thematic depth and change as the game goes along? This isn’t like that, but it’s interesting to hear one of the most familiar pieces of jaunty Shinobi music repurposed to accompany a moment of plot-based emotional trauma for our young Mr. Kidd.
The design itself has a surprising depth to it, that slowly peels away. Each level is full of secrets, and ideal ways to tackle the puzzle-like situations that it presents, often involving abilities that you weren’t aware the character had until you were forced to try them out. Furthermore, the challenge sits at just the right level where it’s never so hard that it’s irritating to play yet it’s never so easy that you can tune out completely. It’s harder if you just charge ahead and tackle things head-on, but it becomes rather easy if you take the time to explore, find all the secrets, and come at the tough situations from an ideal position.
There should have been more of these. Cross-overs should have been Alex Kidd’s thing; it’s already right there in all his game titles. He’s already moving from one world to another, each game a different format from the last. We could have seen Alex Kidd in Golden Axe World. Alex Kidd in the OutRun Zone. Alex Kidd in Monsterland. Alex Kidd in Zillion World. Work that licence, and: Alex Kidd ‘n Ghouls ‘n Ghosts (the Western version of Alex Kidd in Demon Village).
Long-time Sega fans often muse about Alex Kidd, and what happened to him. SEGAGAGA, Hitmaker’s nostalgic if-only farewell game to the Sega of old, released more or less as an epitaph to the company’s days as a first party and to their original company culture, makes a point of this question, answering that at some point the character left Sega, feeling sidelined by all of the new characters like Sonic, and now was working in a convenience store, looking a bit sad.
I’m thinking now, now that they have nothing to lose, Sega could easily restart the franchise by doing an Alex Kidd in Sega World, incorporating everything to the present day. One section might be Alex Kidd in the House of the Dead. Another, Alex Kidd in Shenmue Land. Which would be a total piss take. You know how at the end of each level in Super Mario Bros. 2 (US), there’s that slot machine thing? Like that, but all about petting cats and getting capsule toy trinkets that you’d carry with you for the entire game but would do nothing.
Satire would be the route to take: Think of The Typing of the Dead, but an affectionate (if merciless) tour of all Sega’s biggest or most beloved franchises. Maybe Alex Kidd misunderstands their rules; maybe he understands them too well:
Alex the Kidd-Hogg would disable all buttons but right, down, and jump, yet keep placing things to the left that catch your attention, that it would be nice to go back and explore. (Capsule toys? Cats to pet?)
Alex Kidd in the OutRun Zone, he’d just turn the wheels 90 degrees and drive sideways the whole time, straining his neck and causing crashes and traffic. (This section should also be side-scrolling and should follow the Alex the Kidd-Hogg section so it can be retroactively looped back in for a further gag.)
The game would begin as Alex Kidd in Curse World (compared to the first Alex Kidd game, Alex Kidd in Miracle World), which (beyond a few Q*Bert style expletives) would involve a sort of Faustian bargain to reclaim Alex’s fame and recognition. As it turns out, that bargain forces Alex to live through the roles of all the Sega heroes he’s replaced, racing back and forth to do it all himself. Often ineptly.
Maybe along the way he’d pick up a peeved Opa-Opa (an even earlier Sega mascot; a little sentient space ship from the game Fantasy Zone), who would follow him around like Sonic’s friend Tails or an Option from Gradius, or even at times enlarge to let Alex step on-board.
As he went along, of course, Alex slowly would come to realize things weren’t great for any of the other Sega protagonists either. All of Sega World was, in fact, a bit of a mess, lost to neglect. Heroes like Joe Musashi (from Shinobi) had been missing for years, and nobody even noticed or cared. (Alex might briefly wonder if that was his doing.)
In the end there would be a massive team-up, with everyone — all the Sega heroes Alex tried to replace, and more besides — coming together to fight the curse. Presumably the embodiment or explanation for that curse would have a metaphorical value for Sega’s greater misfortune and the commercial or sociopolitical explanations behind it. They’d start off fighting a bogeyman like the Sony expy villain from SEGAGAGA, then realize things weren’t that easy, and maybe it was just time for everyone to work together and try to build something nice, regardless of any outside pressures or influences.
This is a game I want to play. And on some level, I think it could actually be the thing to elevate Sega back to its heroic status as the scrappy major developer with all the personality.
[ The following post is assembled from fragments of discussion from July 2014, October 2014, July 2016, and August 2017. ]
Long before that AM2R thing, which is exactly what a cynical observer would predict from a fan remake, I’ve often rambled about ways to do a sensitive update of Metroid II, that (unlike AM2R) honors the original game’s tone and thematic material and develops it even further, makes the game even more awkward and upsetting to play:
I still think the best way to tackle a remake is to consider the affect of the original, and try to recreate it. The original is claustrophobic, in part due to feeling lost — sameness, lack of a map — in part to the screen.
So, make light a scarce quantity. The world would be desaturated and have a big focus on environmental light sources — lava, certain bioluminescent plants or animals, Chozo technology. At times it’s hard to see anything. Sort of a Silent Hill aspect.
Samus’s suit may project a slight glow around her, reflecting on things. Generally the glow would extend about as far as the boundaries of the GB screen. Occasionally more or less. The glow from Samus’ suit would give things a sort of monotone hue. Maybe greenish, from her visor.
If you wanted to expand on the game, you could give her various kinds of light beam. Or make her suit glitch out. Maybe special heat and X-ray visors would be needed to navigate certain areas. Glitchily. It would be all grainy and prone to error. Make it go totally dark, for a scripted segment here or there, in the spirit of those segments where you have to blindly fumble around in ball form. Maybe you have to navigate by noise and touch. Maybe a sort of a sonar, so you can hear when the Metroids are getting close.
There might be an attempt at a map, but it doesn’t work right. Glitchy. Staticky. Suggests non-Euclidean space. Some key parts of the interior may not make any sort of euclidean geometric sense. They kind of don’t, already.
This would also play up some of the Zelda-style risk-and-reward progress limitation. You CAN go down there, but… should you?
Also see: Dragon Warrior, Phantasy Star II, Lost in Blue.
But, that’s if I were pressed to reinterpret the game. Insofar as its native form on the Game Boy, Metroid II is basically perfect. The worst I can say is that the control can get a little mushy at times. Speed up Samus’ movement by 125%, maybe tighten collision and response time. Little stuff like that.
Something I really dig about Metroid II is that as designed, it wouldn’t really make as much sense on another console. If you play through as an adult, with a modicum of design literacy in hand, it soon becomes clear to what extent the game actively uses its technical and conceptual limitations to say its own thing.
Unlike Super Metroid the world that it draws doesn’t feel like a playground set up for your benefit. It’s just there. If it’s confusing, then it would be, wouldn’t it. You’re invading this space that was never meant for a thing like you.
The game’s affect is just so subjective.The way the Spider Ball is used nails down how unfriendly the space is. This is a space where we really shouldn’t be, and it’s just by the skin of this overpowered miraculous thing that it works.
When you get to the cramped corridor forcing you to draw a visual parallel between Samus in ball form and the unhatched Metroid egg, there’s not a lot of space left (as it were) to question how expressive the design is meant to be.
It’s supposed to be claustrophobic. It’s meant to be disorienting and upsetting. You’re supposed to lose your way and freak out, the way you probably would in reality if you were dropped into an unmapped hole in the ground on an alien world. Or even ours. Even if mapped. It’s meant to be distressing, in no small part because you shouldn’t be there. The mission is wrong. You are playing the bad guy.
That’s not reading into it. In its closing moments the game tells you how you messed up, and Fusion‘s plot is based on this revelation. (Another irritating thing about Super Metroid is how it not only glosses over this failing; it compounds it. But Fusion gets the story back.) Fusion also gets the claustrophobia and tension back, in a shifted form, where Super throws them out in favor of Whee Shiny Perfect Action.
As far as how Metroid II uses the resources it has, the only thing I would treat differently is the lava. To quote one of many earlier discussions on the topic,
That goddamned lava. What is that? Of all the ways to limit progress. I mean… I can make up some silly theories that kind of work. But how arbitrary is that? At least it’s an apparent phenomenon of the gameworld, even if it’s triggered by discrete player-dependent flags.
Instead of progress clearly resulting from the player’s action it’s just, “What the hell was that rumble? Oh… there’s… a route here. Was it here before? I don’t think so.” Granted, it doesn’t affect me when I’m playing. It’s just in retrospect that it’s so incredibly clumsy and weird.
Of course the game is pretty linear, and it can’t let you miss a Metroid. If there were some narrative rationalization, maybe that would be enough. But then you’re in danger of needless exposition.
On reflection, I would add a horrible piercing screech after the extermination of each set of Metroids and before the earthquake and lava drain. Each time, as Samus strayed deeper into the caverns, the screech would get louder and longer, while the screen would shake with ramping violence. Toward the end, it basically would peak all of the sound output and leave the game a nauseating shaky-cam mess for minutes at a time.
This would serve many purposes.
It would make the game more disorienting and upsetting to play.
It would introduce the Queen early as Samus’s opponent.
It would establish the Queen’s growing pain and anger.
It would help to underline that maybe Samus isn’t quite doing the right thing here.
And it would resolve the structural weirdness around the lava, which as it stands is a VERY CONVENIENT and unexplained progress limiter.
All of this would be totally doable on the Game Boy. Pretty easy, even, in this engine. Everything’s already set up, pretty much. Just add a screech that gets louder and longer each time, and make the screen rumble longer and more violent each time. That’s all! But, it would make such a big difference to the game’s narrative flow, logical consistency, and thematic unity.
Would this change be on-the-nose, in terms of the game’s themes? Maybe. But done well, it wouldn’t be clear what was happening at first. It’d just add a layer of “huh?”, growing to “oh hell.”
Right now there’s little feedback to completing each wave, and the mild rumble has little impact, the lava drain nothing like an explanation. This would add at least a sense of intentionality to the design, which as designed leaves room for interpretation, yes, but also feels sloppy.
Significantly, all of the scream’s and the rumble’ thematic resonance becomes clear only in retrospect. You get ramping uncomfortable chaos as you burrow in, but aside from feeling increasingly intimidated, it’s only clear what’s happening when you finally meet the Queen, which snaps it all into focus.
Currently there is no clear moment of epiphany, and the Queen’s role consists of sitting there, unseen, until you burst in and kill her. The epiphany comes with the egg, which is great. Really great, actually. But its significance would be enhanced, coming out of the catharsis of that encounter with the thing that had been expressing pain the whole time. “Oh hell,” you’d think, “so that’s what has been happening all along. What… does all of this mean? What have I done?” And then, a baby Metroid imprints on you.
You’re still free to interpret however you like, but this gives a touch of emotional feedback and clarity to undermine any sense of bravado. And all it is is a screech and a more violent screen shake. That’s all it takes to snap it all into focus.
So, on Twitter, John Thyer pointed out a tweet suggesting that the new 2D Sonic the Hedgehog game, over which the Internet has obsessed for the last 12 months, is meant to be of the scale of STI’s (that initialism grows all the more pertinent with time) split 1994-ish opus, Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles. This was an ambitious game that, as with many Sonic Team affiliated projects, didn’t meet its deadline, so was hurriedly completed — only to be patched with a second cartridge several months later, containing what was left of the original game plus a surplus of new “content” to justify selling a whole second cartridge. Lock the two cartridges together, and they merge into a monster platforming epic that overstays its welcome by about two-thirds yet that a certain demographic will nonetheless cite as the epitome of its form. It certainly is the epitome of something. I’ll give ’em that.
Anyway. I groused a bit that this claim was not a promising sign, which led to the predictable Twitter push-back. Though, the format of that push-back was a little strange. The claim there was, hang on, Sonic 3&K is the perfect length! It had fourteen whole levels! What, did I want it to be 20 levels more more? Was I nuts?
Uh. Well, uh. Hm.
Let’s dial back a bit, and redefine what we’re talking about.
[The following, I shall repeat directly from Twitter. Consequently, there will be a certain degree of ramble.]
Fourteen “levels” [more properly, Zones — which matters; see below] is, like, three times too many. Especially since half of them are terrible. Sonic 2 was already too long by 1/3 or so. The original Sonic the Hedgehog is just about the ideal length. You get a nice variety. You can explore and master every level. It doesn’t overstay. You can replay. The one thing I’d say against Sonic 1 is, we don’t need to iterate a zone’s concept three times before moving on. Do act 2, boss, move on.
It’s like. Compare.
How many times have you played a game of Tetris, versus how many times have you completed Final Fantasy X for fun? Any time I want to spend half an hour, I can play straight through Sonic 1, have a slightly different and complete experience. Sonic 3 & Knuckles? No way.
You know the best 2D Mario game? Super Mario Land. Lots of reasons why, but a really big draw? You can beat it in 20 minutes. I have never beaten Super Mario World, and I can assure you that it will never, ever, ever happen. There’s too much “content” for the experience. Super Mario Bros. 3 is pushing it, but at least it’s made to be pushed through at a sitting. It’s dynamic, momentum based. Keep moving, changing.
Memory cards, and to a lesser extent their battery-based predecessors, are possibly the worst thing ever to happen to console games. If you want to trace the downward trajectory of design versus rote content addiction, it begins here. We lost all focus once we could save our progress.
I abhor the mentality that we’ve all silently grown into that games are meant to be “finished” then put on the shelf and never played again. No rule is absolute, but that’s basically the point. Expansiveness isn’t linear progress; it’s an accessory to design that has specific uses. Does the nuance of Metal Gear Solid 3‘s discussion justify its length and complexity? Almost certainly yes. Does Sonic 3&K‘s? Probably not. What’s the point of scale when the game never uses that space to say anything novel, and half of the “content” is trash?
The issue at hand is context. For a game based so intrinsically on forward momentum, does it suit that remit to so sprawl? I’m not going to pretend that the roller coaster streamlining of Sonic 2 is ideal, compared to the more measured study of the original Sonic, but it shows what I mean. Underneath whatever variation of (the side scrolling iteration of) Sonic is this set of physics that demands the player to Get It Done; Keep Moving.
When the game gets in the way of Getting It Done, this is a pronounced conflict, best used to draw intentional dissonance with the player. When that dissonance is unguided or misguided, it gets in the way of the game’s essential grammar and message in an infuriating capacity.
This dissonance is a reason that so many people dismiss Sonic 1. No spin-dash! [The slow-moving] Marble Zone! You don’t just keep holding right all the time! Blah! This reaction, though, I submit is a result of a retrospective misreading of the game’s grammar and message, based on a priori assumption. The portions of Sonic the Hedgehog where you aren’t just holding right aren’t examples of broken or misguided design; they serve a purpose. They serve both to establish a broader sense of grammar, causality, and purpose and to underline the moments of speed with significance.
Without a low (or at least a medium), any highs are rendered meaningless. Over years of Pavlovian garbage, Gamers now expect nothing but high. Not only that; thanks to memory cards and decades of rote remakes, they expect lots of it, and never to have to repeat it quite verbatim. We’ll never play this level again, so let’s have twenty more that repeat its basic ideas, so we can say we’ve had our full. Then sequels! And of course we have to save our place, lest we lose our progress and have to play those tedious levels all over again! Heavens! We can’t possibly lose anything, or we’re being treated unfairly. We need more, more more. But — nothing too different, or because we only want this one specific thing.
After 20 years, okay, another major 2D Sonic is probably warranted. Good-O. It’s not like we’re talking a yearly EA franchise update. But. To do this demands that one go back and deconstruct the grammar and messaging: how does how the game say things affect what the game says?
Pac-Man CE is a brilliant deconstruction/refinement of the basic concepts of Pac-Man, cutting out the parts that distract from its message. Sonic 2 is not quite as brilliant, as it just abjectly chops out or papers over the portions of its predecessor that don’t involve zoom-zoom — which makes burn-out a real thing, as the dialogue is nothing but one-dimensional peak messaging for way, way too long. Holding right on a D-pad isn’t interesting in and of itself.
Sonic 3&K gets around this slightly by introducing much bigger levels with different kinds of blockades — so you have to press other buttons besides just right — then mixes its messages, creating a new type of unpleasant dissonance, by timing the maze. (Granted, the levels in Sonic 3 are more considered than the garbage in its content patch (Mushroom Hill can go pleasure itself fungally).)
Point being, if you’re gonna revisit a 25-year-old legacy, there’s a certain remit to plumb deep and try to rediscover its essence. To wit: Gradius V, which, oh my God, finally nails what makes Gradius what it is, and builds a whole game around exploring the consequences of that notion.
This Sonic Mania thing is full of fan service, which is fine, if you’re really into Moia, as it were. The announced scale gives me pause, though. Bigger ain’t better. It can be a neutral quality that supports a justified discussion. But, if it’s huge just to be huge… then, oh dear. When you combine this intended scale with the admitted glory of fan service that seems to make up the game’s fabric, it sounds worrisome.
What is the justification for the scale? What is it doing that demands the player keep trudging forward, saving progress, continuing later? Does it just serve to eat up the player’s time, so that it can put a number on the back of the hypothetical box next to play value? Because, and this is key to the whole relationship between a game and its player, I have a life. Being is time, you know. If something is going to eat up what precious life I have to give it, it had better have a reason. It had better give me some kind of insight, or at least unburdened joy, that makes me measurably better off than I was before I played it.
Each time I play Tetris, or even a short epic like Metroid II, I gain something. I’ve been down this road, but it’s a rich and subtle journey. The journey doesn’t demand so much from me that the burden of embarking it outweighs what fresh nuances it has to impart on a review. I come out rewarded.
A game like Sonic 3 & Knuckles asks that I give it measurably more than it has to offer me. It does give a me negative inspiration — “Don’t Do This” — but it’s not thoughtful enough to use its time effectively. It doesn’t really question its premises and bring them to a logical set of conclusions. There’s not much questioning going on at all, which is, I think, most of my point. The design here is less art; more a matter of rote craft and capitulation.
If the game were to use that space to dwell on the sort of progress that defines a Sonic game and give time for thought, well, okay then! Sonic Adventure justifies its scope for reasons similar to this. It goes to such lengths to dwell on the elements that make up the series. When you’re looking at the motivation that drives the characters and the way all of their perspectives interlock, this is heavy stuff. If there were more meaningful interplay amongst the characters in Sonic 3, and that interplay were reflected in its design, then okay. Scale.
Mind you, I’m not saying that “story” in and of itself is a necessary prerequisite. That’s just one example of a possible justification. If a game is to go deep in exploring the expressive and logical consequences of Sonic the Hedgehog‘s underling assumptions, then take the space you need. I’m not working on a faith that this is why the new game is to sprawl, though, precisely because of how Sonic 3&K is used as a reference point.
If you’re just going to go through the motions of iteration, keep the length to what that iteration can support without overly burdening me.
(And, this is why I can’t ever play videogames anymore. I take them way more seriously than is warranted.)
Addendum:
Incidentally, Sonic 3&K actually has 26 levels, not including special stages or multi-player stage. Ergo it is, to use the original power’s words, “tiresome and boring.” The original Sonic? It has 18 main levels, plus Final Zone [the final showdown area] and all of six special zones. By the poster’s standard (an ideal of 16 levels), it’s much closer to an ideal length! If we were to chop out those unnecessary third acts (which Scrap Brain bulks out by repeating a Labyrinth level), it’d be twelve, plus the special zones. Even better!
Sonic 2 has 20 main levels (plus a few extra in the mobile remake) — with, importantly for this discussion, far less variety. This is the poster’s litmus for too many, and exhaustion.
Sonic CD? If we take into account the past, present, future, and bad future variations of each stage, that gives us SEVENTY barely-differentiated levels. (You may well guess how much I enjoy Sonic CD. The answer lies not in the number alone, but the “barely-differentiated” plus the number.)
I just read a question that I find strange. Someone wanted to know the best NES games, with the understanding that most of the big ones would be superseded by later, better remakes. It was pointless to play Metroid, for instance, though maybe the first Zelda did a few unique things. Were there any games that were still worth playing?
The reason I find this strange is that the approach seems so askew. The reason to go to NES games will be less in terms of what they have to offer mechanically from a contemporary perspective; the main appeal here will be their method. It’s in the look, the sound, the technical limitations that result in the problem-solving that forms the basis of most of the design.
The most interesting things that you’ll find here are informed by these ephemera of a context that doesn’t exist anywhere else. Metroid isn’t interesting on the NES because of the shape of its world or what the buttons do; it’s because the game is both glitchy as fuck and designed so that most of its genuine surprises come off like possible glitches. The experience of playing the game feeds from a sort of cognitive dissonance between what you’re seeing and what might be, that creates a sense of endless possibility.
The best NES games feed into that dissonance, to create an idea that anything could be out there.
I guess I mean to say that the experience of the NES is one of uncertainty. The system is like a Schrodinger’s Box. Nothing is clearly defined except in the moment of experience — a moment that for all you know may never be recaptured.
Why do the rocks in Zelda look like turtles?
Wait, there’s a second quest? Where the world has different rules?!
Could there be another world entirely, if you burn the right bush?
Can you get to the end of the minus world?
What exists outside the normal Metroid levels?
Can you hit Deborah’s Cliff with your head?
Super Mario Bros. a third time?
What happens if you climb off the screen?
Am I meant to be able to do the thing I’m doing?
It’s childhood myth and legend encoded in inconclusive living hieroglyphics. Whispers in the night. Nightmares in silicon, filtered through corroded contacts, coaxial cable, and the roughly traced path of an electron gun.
Back then it was very hard to pass judgment on what was a “good” or a “bad” game; it was more that some things were more opaque than others, and better at hiding their secrets.
And then you get to the chaos wrought by the Game Genie, which at first wasn’t exclusively a cheating device — it was a hacking device, allowing you to fundamentally alter the experience of playing. Make Mario walk backwards. Be Small Firey Mario at any time! Make the entire world black, so you have to feel your way around…
To that end, Simon’s Quest is one of the most definitive NES games. It is pure ambiguity, obfuscation, and interpretation from start to end. It even has three endings, to enhance the what-might-be.
I should make a list of the definitive NES experiences, in the sense of those games that most embody the uncertainty that we have so dearly lost over the years.
(The following is based on my portion of a Twitter conversation with John Thyer, Amandeep Jutla, and Thom Moyles.)
Weirdly, I think The King of Fighters is another half-decent example of this sort of design. There is a huge, multifaceted story underneath each game, going back years; dozens of perspectives. Most of that comes out through the way the characters animate, how they respond to each other, and little bits of action and dialogue scattered through the series, with only scant exposition.
As with Phantasy Star II or Riven, your part is to take what you’re shown and work out all the implications; figure out how we got here from there, and what that may mean for the future. Thinking about the logistics of who is paired with whom; who has stayed out this year, and why… It’s this really complicated, dramatic scenario that actually is in there, yet just barely narrated.
All of it is told by your looking a character in the eyes and saying, “Whoa, what happened to you?” And then you look for the evidence, and you find it. And it’s this whole, intense thing that feeds back into how you read the game, and how you look at the next character, and the next. Which may in part why I find The King of Fighters ’99 — which clears the decks and introduces a new story, new hero, at the expense of the old, now-resolved plotline — so rewarding, and… why it may have irritated others. Because the answer to how we got here is so intense, takes so long to work through successfully.
This may also be part of why a game like its follow-up KoF 2000, though very well-made, fails to satisfy me as much. The answer to how we got here is… well, a few more (very cool) characters have joined, and things are moving along. Its intricate web of endings provides a deep well of speculation for the future. But the past? It’s basically, “Okay, you’ve played ’99? Well, good. You’re up-to-speed. Here’s another game.” Which may in turn partially explain why other people tend to like 2000 so much more than ’99 or 2001. It’s giving them what the average person who plays fighting games, even SNK games, is looking for: stability.
I am a weirdo in this regard, I guess. There are many things that I like about (the third and final game in that arc) KoF 2001 in particular. One of them is where it brings all of this. You read into (the old protagonist) Kyo’s psychological state in that game — what his moves are, how they parallel with (his rival) Iori. Knowing what he’s been put through the last few years, it’s kind of chilling to see. Nothing talks about it overtly, but you see him coming apart, turning into something dangerous. There is a sort of dramatic culmination in so many aspects of the game. It’s chilling in how logical, yet messy, it all is.
I just want to soak in the world of 2001, and what it means. Right off the bat, there’s so much coded meaning. One of the first things you see is (current hero) K’ putting his red glove on. This is really important. Later on, you see (new rival) K9999 coming out of his cloning chamber. His first action? Show us his glove. The game makes an immediate parallel and contrast here, showing their relationship; the glove is his identifier, whereas K’ has to make the conscious decision to put his back on in order to meet this new danger.
In 2000 it was a mark of victory for K’ that he ripped it off, no matter the pain he felt. What he’s faced with now is that important, that he’s choosing to wear it again on his own terms. Whereas before, he decided that he’d prefer to burn uncontrollably than to be defined by the thing and all it represented.
Granted, future games don’t really follow through on the stuff in 2001. But that’s nothing new. Likewise 2001 doesn’t follow up on all of the interesting implications of 2000‘s web of endings. But in it own right, taken as an independent thing, 2001 is just so heavy with significance.
Even the game system in 2001 follows this. It’s a brutal, simple logical conclusion to the disjointed scraps introduced in ’99 and refined without question in 2000. It’s not balanced well, but, what do I care? I’m not playing it competitively. I’m just appreciating it. The systems are violently elegant in their conception, which, considering, every other aspect of 2001, is so appropriate. The way it looks, the way it sounds, the way it plays — it’s all part of the narrative.
The crude, jagged-sounding, obsessively repetitious music — it’s overtly ugly, and that enhances the message. It sounds angry, dangerous, a bit deranged. It makes you uncomfortable to hear. Whereas ’99 is all chrome and gel lighting and blippy electronica, 2001 is corrosion and sparks. It’s like… we’ve come to this, now. Flesh is decaying. Metal is decaying. Minds are decaying.
And look at this; we now have a NESTS team, led by K9999. And Kyo and Iori are back for real now? And can you even tell the difference between them anymore? Everyone is falling. All is going wrong. With all of this happening, of course all of the character portraits are going to be grotesque. How could they not be?
But… I suppose most people don’t approach a versus fighting game the way that I approach Riven. If people who actually like Myst are so upset by Riven, I suppose I can see how SNK fans view 2001.
(The following is based on my portion of a Twitter conversation with John Thyer, Amandeep Jutla, and Thom Moyles.)
Riven… doesn’t really have puzzles as such. It’s just stuff you notice and associate and slowly understand as you explore. Anything that may superficially read as a puzzle is usually a practical device that you just don’t understand yet. The reason you don’t understand is that it’s not for you. You have no part in this world. You’re an unaccounted-for interloper. It’s Anthropology: The Game. Who lives here? What are they like? What do they do? What do they believe?
Myst fans tend to loathe Riven because its puzzles are so impossibly obtuse and unfair. I suppose they should be, because… there aren’t any, really — and the players are approaching this beautiful, internally consistent world like, well, like Gamers.
There is irony here. The underlying story to Myst is about this violent family struggle, centering on Atrus and his dad, Gehn. Gehn is a hard-ass who loves the power of “creating” these worlds through writing, and acts like he’s their God. But he’s so bad at it. The worlds he writes are unstable, because he has no art. He approaches them like formulas to solve. He has to keep going in and writing more and more to try to stabilize things, but usually just makes things worse in the end.
The son, Atrus, sees the art in the writing, and approaches it as a creative work. Ironically he has doubts that he’s creating anything. He strongly suspects that these worlds always existed, and the writing just connects him to these places. (Atrus, unsurprisingly, fell in love with a lady from one of these “created” worlds, and married her. Name of Catherine.)
The games barely touch on most of this backstory, but it does help to inform what’s going on with them.
What I’m getting at is that Myst fans all seem to approach the series as if they were its villain, Gehn.
Riven is Cyan’s creative climax. It’s everything they built toward, and it was so monumental that it ended them. Myst is The Hobbit to its Lord of the Rings (never mind that The Hobbit is better). And people hated the hell out of it. Almost universally.
The game came out the same year as Half-Life; general PC gamers said, “More of this Myst shit? This is 2008, and the game is exactly the same as Myst! What they hell have they been doing all this time? Adventure games are dead!”
Myst fans were no better. Riven freaked them out because it looked like Myst and had the same interface, but they knew enough to know that it played very differently. It was like a Zelda II situation; what the hell is this? We want the same thing we liked before!
So, there was no audience for Riven. It got pilloried in the gaming press, such as it was. It sold okay, but nothing like what had been hoped. The pain of creation split up the brothers Miller, and so far as I know they never worked together again. Later games by lesser artists ignored Riven, each one promising to bring Myst back to its roots as a collection of self-contained puzzles, and nothing more confusing than that.
If people were just willing to listen, Riven could have changed everything about how games are made and read. If you approach the game as it was designed, it reads as a final creative statement about the evolution of the adventure genre into something greater, wiser. This is one of the keystones of videogames as serious works of literature unto themselves… which, of course, nobody ever plays. So, really, it’s the keystone of nothing. A cul-de-sac in the maturation of a medium.
Speaking from my own contemporary experience, Myst was interesting for its time, but had always felt not quite there to me. Riven was a revelation. I’ve rarely felt so transported by a game, into a real space that seems to exist for its own reasons apart from me. When I visit Jungle Island, I just stop at the staircase and sit. I want to feel the warmth of the sun, the cool of the shade.
More than that, though — the world of Riven is built on inference, and progress is earned through active speculation, based on an intuition and an empathy for the people and forces that shaped the world that you visit.
These are the traits lacking in Gehn. Gehn is not a mustache-twirling villain; he’s just wrong, and is angry. He’s an intelligent man, curious about the world before him — but he totally lacks intuition or empathy. He is, in our frame of reference, a Victorian empiricist. He doesn’t have the framework to understand what he’s working with, and it frustrates him.
In Riven the way that things are is the story. The game is about understanding the causality and the psychology that lead us to affect our worlds. It rarely if ever reaches out, makes an overt point about what we see. It leaves any conclusions to us.
For me, the game’s sense of narrative perfectly fits the way that I read media: looking between the lines for what brought us to this point. Why are things as they are? How did they get to be like this? What role do the pieces play?
Usually in videogames, the only useful answer is the functional one: either to reward, or to limit the player. Or, just, you know, because. If there is a rationale, it’s beside the point of the intended play; a triviality. Riven is interesting in that the inference is the play — and it just lets the player get on with it. One way or another, if you’re actively engaged with the world (instead of wasting your effort trying to solve it) you’ll start to notice how things reflect each other, how physically and conceptually distant things might be in some way related.
To make this feasible, it over-stacks the deck to ensure that the player will make some kind of connection. Every player will notice different things, and it’s pointless to force them to see what they don’t. Instead of going the Nintendo route and narrating the player to death — look at this thing; see, you need to do this, understand it — Riven accounts for different ways of thought by providing several routes toward understanding things. One player might make a visual analogy; another might pick up on an audio cue, or notice a thematic pattern.
The end effect of this effort is that every aspect of its world feels all the more layered and contextualized. The better you understand how it all fits together as a system, the better you understand how and why its pieces function — but what you do with that understanding is up to you.
Which may be why people hate the game, find it so difficult.
Something that has puzzled me since I began to write about games is that people genuinely seem not to be bothered by Nintendo’s “shut up while I explain at you” model. Though there may well be a counter-example, from Wind Waker to Wii Fit I’ve yet to see an EAD-produced game that allows you to skip or dismiss, or even speed up, a text box.
I’m talking about the text boxes that will pop up even the eighteenth or thirtieth time you do something, and talk to you as if it’s the first. The ones that stop your game to explain every key, every rupee; the ones that refuse to let you just boot up a minigame because an anthropomorphized balance board wants to spend several minutes talking to you about the weather.
Here I’m just talking about text, but it’s not just text. When Nintendo wants your attention, it won’t accept any response but obedience. Your role is to do what the game tells you.
And this — this seems to be what people want from a videogame. To hear it told, the EAD model is beyond reproach. This is, in fact, ideal game design. People want to follow a formula. They want to collect things, check them off a list. Ambiguity makes them angry.
Me… I would love to see, is there a list of other games that are about understanding why things are as they are? The first two Metroids (and Prime) do this, to an extent. The NES Zeldas. Phantasy Star. What I’ve heard of Gone Home sounds roughly aligned with Riven.
Why is this still, in 2016, so rare a perspective for a game to take? What, really, is wrong with videogames, that if any game should be heralded as the ideal, Riven is not that game?
Codification of a schema needs to be considered a regressive step, that limits future discussion by narrowing acceptable language. The moment you define what a thing is supposed to be, all meaningful inquiry will immediately shut down in deference to that definition.
Current charts of the growth and development of a form tend to be lists of landmark cases where frameworks were defined forevermore. For videogames, let’s say Super Metroid. Or A Link to the Past. Dracula’s Curse, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 — all of these idealized moments when something was crystalized as the template for all future discussion.
I am going to counter that these lists are in fact lists of the death of a form; of every turn where its potential was narrowed and stripped away. Any progressive chart of a form will list branching points where new and valuable concepts were introduced to the language. New potential. New nouns, new verbs, new adjectives. New examples of an expressive functional application of the form. Not definitions; propositions.
This is why, for me, game design began its slow death with Super Mario Bros. — not through any fault of the game itself, but rather through its canonization and codification. The SNES only cemented the rot, after which there has been no escape. I don’t know that we’ll ever escape it. This medium is rotten at its core.
A notion on which I’ve often dwelled of late (and may well have discussed here or on some social media outlet) is that when I was young I had no concept of a bad videogame. Games that today carry a reputation as horrible, poorly designed duds — Deadly Towers, 8 Eyes, Dr. Chaos, Hydlide — just seemed to me, at the time, as if they were above me somehow. I didn’t understand them, much as I was unprepared to understand much of the world. In that, they held a certain mystique.
I didn’t play them much, as I couldn’t get far and I got frustrated — but I never blamed that on the games. It never occurred to me to pass judgment. I just figured they were made for someone else, or for a time when I was older and prepared to understand them.
Even today when I look back on these games I get an intriguing sense of cognitive dissonance. I understand that they weren’t altogether successful creative efforts, for one reason or another — but they challenge me to look at things in ways that I otherwise wouldn’t, to try to understand how and why they are as they are.
In that, I find these games endlessly fascinating — whereas my fascination with more accessible, clearly well-designed games ended long ago, once I got everything that they had to say.
