Looking back at the content I have made this semester, and how I have promoted it, I think I could have done a bit better if I had promoted it over facebook instead of Twitter.

This idea came to me about halfway through the semester. I participate in a lot of video game discussion groups through facebook, and I feel like this would have been a better kind of niche to show my blog to. In the future I want to put more effort into my content so that I can feel confident enough to share it more.

I am trying to make a bit of video content regularly now and I feel like that would be a great way to promote the blog/have the blog promote the videos. Doubling the visuability to double the traffic!

I just looked at my site stats for the first time and they are not flattering at all, hahah.

They have been terrible, but I feel that this is only because of my lack of social media push. The exponential growth every month is promising though, and I feel that the more I post, than the more potential traffic there will be.

Overall, I am proud of some of the content that I made through this blog, and I plan on continuing it after the semester. I feel like this is a great, fun way for me to expand my skills as a writer and my portfolio.

Hello again America.

Today I have something very important to speak about. You see a downright discrimination is happening at Nintendo, as once again they have refused for the beloved weirdo, Toad, to be a playable character in the game series “Super Smash Bros”.

The new entry to the series, “Smash Bros Ultimate” was just released yesterday. Spouting the biggest character roster in fighting game history, and with 74 fighters of classic video game characters, my main man Toad is still getting the shaft.

The Smash Bros. series has become, in it’s five iterations, a celebration of Nintendo history as well as video games in general. Out of the 74 characters, nine of these are from the Mario series. And two of those have never been playable in a Mario game (Daisy and Bowser Jr.. This is what leads me to beg the question, why not Toad?

Look at that beautiful boy-man.

Toad has not only been around since the first “Super Mario Bros” game, he has been a playable character in many Mario titles. He was the strongest choose-able character in “Super Mario Bros. 2” and he was the protagonist of “Wario’s Woods”. He plays a supporting role in nearly every Mario game, if not all of them, and in the most recent Paper Mario game there is an entire civilization of Toads.

But continuously, entry after entry of Super Smash Bros., Toad is reduced to being a weapon that Peach pulls out of her dress. He is used for her gain. And he doesn’t seem to like it.

To play devil’s advocate, he does seem to be a bit more willing in the new title.

I still feel like this isn’t enough for my man-diaper boy. I want to see him pull up the sleeves of that vest and go ham on Mario. But alas, I should be content with the ridiculous amount of characters that I have to choose from in the game.

I just feel that an injustice is being done to my boy. So please, my fellow Smashers, vote for Toad and prevent anymore wrong being done to this good man-thing.

Thank you.

 

Winter break is coming. Which to me means no studying to deal with when I get off work; no bus to have to catch; and no textbooks for five weeks. Time to turn up the heater, order some pizza, drink some dark beer and play way too many video games.

Not just any games though. There are a handful of games that are universally adored by the gaming world that I have either never finished, or for some, never even touched.

And some of these blind spots are a bit of an embarrassment to me. If you were to walk in my apt. you would see how me and my partner are pretty obsessive about games.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

So yeah, I feel that it is my civic duty to fill in these holes in my history, and have a good time in the process.

Five weeks, Five games. Or at least, that’s the goal.

Here is the list I have come up with:

#1.

(Chrono Trigger)

Growing up, I never had any friends that were into Japanese role-playing games (JRPGs), so it is a genre that I did not get into until I played through Dragon Quest VIII a few years ago. I have now been going through as many of the classic JRPGs as I can, and Chrono Trigger is supposed to be the grand-daddy of them all.

 

#2

(Super Metroid)

This is one that I chose not to play for a long while. I had played Metroid fusion as a kid, and had heard that this one was really, really similar. So although I loved Metroid fusion, I typically would rather play something new than re-tread old ground. In recent years though, I have played the first few hours of Super Metroid, and I loved it. It feels so much more isolating than Fusion did. I have just never got around to finishing it, but it is going to happen this time!

 

#3

(Portal)

It is weird to think that this game only came out last console generation, because the fanfare of love around it makes it seem as if it is an all-time classic. Which it may very-well be now. But I was a Playstation 3 guy during last generation, and for some reason the PS3 copies were very rare to find. So I just never got around to experiencing the sensation.

 

#4

(Earthbound)

Yet another Super Nintendo entry to the list, and another JRPG too. This is one that I have always wanted to get around to. I love it when entertainment can be weird and goofy but still have something poignant to say, which is exactly what I have heard everyone say about Earthbound.

 

#5

(Zork)

The text-based adventure that Ernest Cline would not shut up about in Ready Player One. But I don’t think that was the first that I have heard it from, Zork is one of those names that I see pop up all over the place. And somehow even though it has been out for nearly 40 years, I still have no idea what it’s about or how it ends.

 

I also have a few alternative ones that I might throw in, in case I am just feeling something different:

–Half-life 2, Which just like Zork, I really don’t know much about other than it’s sci-fi and no one ever shuts up about it.

–Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Which I have played up to the third to last dungeon and I have beaten with a friend back in elementary school, but I still kinda feel like I haven’t personally gone through it all. Might be worth a true finish.

 

On top of all of these, I know that my wife really wants to play this new one called “Return of the Obra-Dinn”. And I will of course be playing a ton of the new Smash Bros. So yep, that’s my holiday plans. Fingers are going to cramp. Backs are going to be sore. It is happening.

In 2006, the video game industry was in an exciting moment. A new generation of consoles had been released the year prior; consoles that had the technical capabilities to present, movie like graphics. And to the two major console manufacturers, Sony and Microsoft, this meant that they had to make the most realistic looking, cinematic, mind-blowing games possible. Nintendo was off in the corner playing with its Wiimote.

This is not the only factor that led to there being a big spike in cinematic games during this era though. The video game industry has always been intertwined with the tech industry, game developers are always pushing to make the next best-looking, more-impressive game. Having a game that can claim to have the “best graphics of all time” or “the most particle effects ever” is an easy marketing tool. But over time, as game console generations drag on, the developers are anchored to the hardware that they have to develop for. This makes it very exciting for game makers when a new console is released.

So, the first-party development teams at Playstation and Xbox are trying to prove that their console can produce the best graphics, and you have third-party developers wanting to make the best looking games as well. You can see how this is turning into a dogpile of game companies all trying to make the most technically impressive game of all time, but how does that mean that the games have to be “cinematic”?

(Games like Dragon’s Lair were early examples of cinematic storytelling being used in the medium)

Well to be honest, I really feel that this happened for the sake of palatability. Video games have been trying to tell stories since the early 80’s, and have always wanted to be as easily understandable as their older sister, film.  It doesn’t take much thought to watch a movie, it is a very passive medium. So if video games could capture some of this magic, it would allow them to be much more marketable, people would be able to watch a game and have just as good of a time as if they were playing it. Opening up the market to more than just the hardcore. Now that technology had finally caught up with the video games, this was finally feasible.

And there were so many games in this generation that did pull this off, it became the standard rubric of big-budget video games of the era. Uncharted, The Last of Us, Gears of War, Heavy Rain, etc., etc. The infrastructure of online video games had not become as established at the time, game developers primarily made their money from selling games.

(Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us)

This is why I think that this style of game has diminished. Because of the high-speeds of modern internet and the prevalence of competitive online gaming, big-budget game developers have now shifted their focus onto making “games-as-a-service” style products. They no longer want to make a game that only sells millions of copies, they want to make a game that the consumer will continue to play for hundreds of hours, and will continue to spend money on.

I guess that there is not anything particularly wrong about this, it is just not the type of games that I prefer to play. I don’t want to play a competition, I want to play through a piece of art. A handcrafted story, told to me through a world that I can waltz around in.

Business is cyclical though, and maybe in another decade the tides will shift back.

 

 

 

 

The Legend of Zelda is known as one of the most imaginative, polished, and engrossing game series of all time. Nearly every entry is universally beloved by all. But it has never been a series known for having particularly emotional narratives; actually, they typically don’t have much of a narrative at all.

Link’s Awakening was the fourth entry of the series and the first Zelda title to be designed for Nintendo’s Gameboy. Because the Gameboy was a portable system, and taken less seriously as Nintendo’s mainline home consoles, the designers of the game were given much more creative freedom to create a Zelda title with a much weirder world.

The result was a one of the funniest Zelda titles, with moments like a shopkeeper beating you up for robbing his store to Super Mario references and meta-textual jokes. But the humor and surreal elements to the game are not the only side to the coin, in fact the game gets a bit darker than any other Zelda ever has. Which hit me especially hard when I finally made it to the end of the game.

I was born in 1993, the same year that this game was released, to a great pair of dorks. My father had been obsessed with the early days of home computer gaming, playing dos games and writing simple programs in BASIC. So naturally when the Gameboy was released in ’89 he was overjoyed, finally a way for him to play video games while out on military tour. Being an RPG fan, when he heard of a Zelda game coming to the system he snatched it up pretty quick.

So, Link’s Awakening was always around while I grew up. I would watch my dad from over his shoulder without knowing what was really going on, on the screen. As I got to be a bit older I eventually learned how to move the little Link sprite around myself. And over time I made my own save file, attempting to attain all eight instruments, wake the wind fish and win the game. How long to beat.com says that Link’s Awakening takes about 15 hours to beat, it took me about 18 years.

If you have never played a Zelda game, they are a blend of puzzles and action, typically meaning that in order to progress onto the next dungeon you have to solve a very obscure sort of environmental puzzle. Something that as a kid I did not necessarily have the patience for. So over the course of my adolescence I would boot up my save every few months and maybe solve another small puzzle or do a little bit. Celebrating the times where I actually finished one of the eight dungeons.

It wasn’t until the end of my senior year of high school that I beat the game. It was Taks test week, which meant that I would be forced to sit in a class for hours after finishing my test. Naturally for me I used this time to play a few games, I had beaten another game so I popped in the old Link’s Awakening cart. Continuing on from a bit after the halfway point, I found my way to a cave where I had to retrieve a key for the next dungeon. On the wall of the cave was something bizarre, it was a mural, sort of a cave painting. And it read this: “To the finder… the isle of Koholint, is but an illusion… human, monster, sea, sky… a scene on the lid of a sleeper’s eye… Awake the dreamer, and Koholint will vanish much like a bubble on a needle… cast-away, you should know the truth!”

 

This took me in a weird way, it insinuates that everything in the game was fake,. (Which I guess it is haha) and that they would go away if I wake the wind fish, finishing the game. Getting closer to the end of the game, it starts making this clearer and clearer. When you wake the wind fish this world of Koholint island will disappear, none of it ever will have existed. All the funny characters that I had grown up with, I would cause them all to be gone from their cute, wacky lives.

This was still a quest that I had been wanting to beat my whole life, so I kept on and on the last day of the Taks testing I finished the last dungeon. Meeting the wind fish, in all its glory.

As cheesy as this sounds, I had been waiting on this moment my whole life. My dad had lost interest in the game after his main save file was corrupted when he got to the seventh dungeon. And my brother had only ever made it to the sixth dungeon, none of us had ever made it to see the windfish.

The windfish has a small speech that he gives you, he thanks you for waking him from his dream. Ending with,

“Verily, it be the nature of dreams to end! When I dost awaken, Koholint will be gone… Only the memory of the dream will exist in the waking world… Someday thou will recall this island… That memory must be the real dream world. ..

Come, let us awaken, Together.”

I then watched, with water swelling into my eyes as the game shows all of the characters of the game fading away. The hardest of which for me was Marin, the sort of love interest who has a few heart to heart moments with Link throughout the game.

The camera zooms out to show the entire island as it all fades away, and at this point I had tears rolling down my face. Other classmates were giving me bizarre glances as I was hunching over my Gameboy, crying. I couldn’t quell my emotions though, this world of Koholint and it’s inhabitants had been a constant in my life. And now these characters were gone.

There is a Japanese idea, called mono no aware, and it means that you should be sensitive to and appreciate life, given that it will eventually pass. Kind of a positive version of existentialism, and I think that this game taught me this sort of peace.

My Koholint friends might be gone, as is every dreamworld that we awaken from, but I can still fondly remember my time with them.

Or just replay the game.

Pokemon is a beloved franchise (a very lucrative one too) . It is an impressively deep role-playing game franchise, known for the cuteness of it’s monster inhabitants and the social aspect of trading/battling monsters with friends.

Aside from a few exceptions though, Pokemon games have never had very good stories. You fight your way through eight gyms, take out the bad guys who are trying to steal Pokemon and give yourself a pat on the back. And the newest core games in the franchise: Pokemon Sun and Moon, follow this pattern in a similar way, they got rid of the gyms but it’s pretty much the same jazz.  That being said there is a post-game side quest that knocked the wind out of me, because for the first time in, maybe ever(?) Pokemon gets really dark, and really genuine.

After I had beaten the game I decided to wander about the different islands of the games’ Hawaii inspired region of Alola. Eventually I found a older gentleman who recognized that I was a Pokemon trainer, and noticed my badges, indicating that I had beaten the main game. He then starts talking about how he used to be a trainer:

This is when the task is finally given: Go out and search the region for these different trainers that he used to fight, finding out what they have been doing with their lives for the past 30 years.

I wasn’t really thinking much about the task when he gave it to me, it just seemed like any typical quest. But then I went to the first of these trainers.

Her name was Jane and he described her as being a “tyrant in battle”. I found her at what the game calls the “Community Center” of one of the islands but it looks more like a retirement home. Jane is very old and is staring at a TV, when I asked her about the man who sent me she doesn’t remember him.

And almost all of the other trainers have similar stories. One of them has been working at the same power plant for all of those 30 years.  Another one says that he just got out of the hospital after staying there for a while, and he tells me this:

 

Like I said before, this earnest talk about life and death knocked the wind out of me. Not only is this uncommon for a Pokemon game, this kind of writing isn’t very common in Nintendo games in general. But this wasn’t the heaviest one, no that was the last one of the trainers that I visited.

I was told that the last user’s name was Sakura, and where to find her. But there was no elderly woman when I got to the house, only a young girl. The girl explained to me that her grandmother was the trainer I was looking for, and that she had passed away a couple of years ago.

The grand-daughter still battles you, and afterward she says this:

It’s kind of remarkable to me that a little post-game quest had this much care put into it. Enough for it to give a genuine expression of humanity and to capture the brevity of life. Somehow some game about catching monsters does this.

 

 

 

Polytheistic religions often have an ungodly amount of deities, ones for every little specific thing you can imagine. Iris was the Greek Goddess of rainbows, Cardea was the Roman Goddess of door hinges and if we had our own American pantheon of deities, then Jeremy Parish would be the God of video game history.

Parish is a former games journalist, turned games historian. He currently runs the websites: Game Boy Works and NES Works where he chronologizes Nintendo and Gameboy games. He meticulously scans the original box art of these games, then writing an analytical video or blurb for each one. The websites’ content has slowly been printed into books as well; the idea being that future generations can have an idea of how every one of these games looked/played.

 

He was one of the first games journalists to start emphasizing the importance of video game preservation and I have so much respect for him and his work. Early film history has many gaps, and there are so many lost works of ancient literature, the hope of Parish and others like him is to keep this from happening to video games.

Getting back to the sites themselves, they are so fun to just scroll through and look at all the game art. The images pop right out at you, making the website simple to navigate. I have found so many really interesting NES and Gameboy games from these sites that I would not have otherwise.

It is also worth noting that Parish has a retro-gaming podcast called Retronauts along with a very active youtube channel. In the show, he and other rotating guests will analyze retro video games, and interview game creators.

I am excited to see the Nes Works and Game Boy Works chronology continue to grow, and hopefully Parish will be able to fill it out with every one of the systems’ games.

 

I know that you’re excited to read this post, but first go get me 12 wolf pelts from the other side of town!

Side quests are more often than not just that, some boring fetch quest so that, best case scenario you can get some experience or a swank piece of loot.  We all groan when the NPC sends us off, once again to grab some garbage that they carelessly left on top of a damn building.

This type of lazy task-building is still a big part of gaming, and it is not going anywhere. “Games-as-a-service” style games are even taking this to new levels with games like Destiny 2 having you repeat the same missions over and over to mind numbing degrees. Recently though, games have been moving in a positive direction on this front.

The touchstone for this shift towards meaningful side quests in the triple A gaming world has to be The Witcher 3, and I am definitely not the only person who thinks this. The most interesting one of the dozens of quests in this game is one called “Carnal Sins”.

This begins when friend of the protagonist calls upon you for help after his lover is badly disfigured when a mysterious entity attacks her. The mission becomes a bit of a murder mystery as you go about inspecting other victims of this mysterious enemy.

The trail eventually leads to a reverend who has deep ties to organized crime. The game really wants you to believe that this reverend is the culprit behind these attacks, if you have not been closely paying attention to the clues than he would seem to fit the bill well enough.

A closer investigation though indicates that he is actually not the killer but the most interesting thing about this quest, what puts it above all the rest for me, is that the game actually would let you make the mistake of killing him. If you kill this “red herring” reverend than the quest ends, your friend believes that you saved the day, hizzahs all around! Then a few more victims are found, but you have lost the trail of the true killer.

It is so uncommon for a game to have this dynamic of split story threads, for the stories to actually end up this radically different. And for a game to expect you to be this attentive is kind of rare.

Also the true killer is a badass vampire that you get to fight. So come on, this is for sure the raddest side quest in the Witcher 3 and a good example of how the gaming industry is starting to put more care into side content as a whole.

 

You see it very often now. An indie game is marketed on some sort of gameplay crux that you can tell your friends all about. “I’ve heard of that game! It’s the one that you only have one weapon in.” or “That’s the game that only uses 2 colors!”.

I don’t say this as an attack on independent game developers. It can be hard enough to create a fun experience to share with people, let alone one that is marketable enough for you to break even on the development costs. I am only exploring this observation to talk about how seldom it is that these games go beyond their gimmick and how remarkable it is when a game does.

Two recent examples of this are Minit and The Sexy Brutale. They both have a very similar hook: Your life is on a timer, when the timer is up you die and then re-explore the same space with the knowledge you gained from before. Or as many, many outlets put it “Groundhog day, the video game”. But one of the two really did something spectacular with that gimmick, intertwining it with the narrative to create a heartbreaking late game revelation.

Comparing the first hour or so of each of these games they both seemed like charming games. Minit’s Gameboy style pixel art gave me all sorts of nostalgia; I will always have a permanent Gameboy sized groove in my heart. And The Sexy Brutale has a very dry english sense of humor that comes out from the very beginning.

-Trying to survive through the slow-talking turtle

Getting further into each of the two games, they stay fun. The core loop of the game stays steady, the puzzles get a little tougher. You progressively start having to spin more and more plates  to achieve different goals before the timer runs up. Your standard difficulty curve for games of this ilk. But as I got further and further into The Sexy Brutale the tone and atmosphere began to change a bit. What began as a dark, swanky, burlesque mansion tour of debauchery turns into a surreal fever dream.

If you have not guessed now, Minit is not the game that stood out to me of the two. I had a very fun three hours or so with Minit, and I adored every moment. But it never really broke through the shackles of it’s core concept of replaying the same minute over and over, it was very much a short, fun experience.

Spoilers Ahead For The Sexy Brutale!

On the other hand The Sexy Brutale slogged for a bit, and honestly I don’t know if it needed to have as many puzzles as it did. But the late game really did make it worth the journey.

As I mentioned before, the game starts to take a turn towards the end. The first half or so is full of quirkiness and humor. The murders elevate in oddity as the game progresses; giant spiders, voodoo piranhas, and ghosts for example are all means of death for the mansion’s unlucky guests. And I did found the wackiness of it all very amusing, but it really did not seem to be anything more than that. After 20+ years of playing in this medium I am used to games being kinda goofy, I don’t expect there to be any more depth to it than that.

-Being eaten by a giant spider, not the way I would want to go.

But this oddity grew more and more, becoming eerily absurd. I entered one room to find that there was a literal black hole in it. And then the game drops the twist on you. Tells you that everything was being projected from the Lafcadio/Lucas, the protagonist’s, head. He was the real killer originally, all of his friends and family died from a foolish mistake he made.

-The bizarre hole into the unknown, completely unexplained in the game.

The ol’ fight club, Shamalayan, twist! This is usually not my cup of tea at all, but it makes the entire game make perfect sense. The absurdity of the murders were because he was trying so hard to imagine a way that the deaths could not have been his fault. And the whole loop and gimmick of the game is now given so much weight! You keep rewinding through the same day, trying desperately to save these people over and over again.

I cannot think of too many more games that accomplish this intertanglement of narrative theme and gameplay gimmick so well. At least nothing is coming to me right now.

If you’re looking for some more interesting bits about The Sexy Brutale, this dev diary video is pretty interesting and in some ways ties into the themes here.

 

Well, hope you enjoyed the post! If this made you think of any games then feel free to comment below or shoot me a message on twitter.

After reading my header and getting a loose idea of what this blog is, you might be wondering: “why do I need another dweeb’s opinions about video games, isn’t there enough of that out there?”

And the short answer of this is: Yeah there is, and you really don’t.

But if you love video games as much as I do  I would hope that you also love analyzing them and conversing about them just as much. That is what this blog is really getting at. A platform to analyze, discuss, and goof about specific games, as well as the gaming world as a whole.

There are so, so, so many games out there to talk about, and not enough light is shined on the artistry of a lot of them. It takes hundreds of hours for nearly every game to be made, for some it can take millions. Dozens of games are released every week, there is no possible world where any outlet can cover every game. So I think it’s necessary for individuals to appreciate these works and give our incite into them.

I will try not to focus too much on the newest, shiniest games; there are so many outlets doing that already. Instead I want to focus on stuff that has been out long enough for it to have reached a broader audience than just the hardcore consumers.

So that’s about it, happy button mashing everyone!

 

 

 

This is another blog that I occasionally update on destructoid.com if you want to read some more of my rants.

Here is a link if you are interested:

https://www.destructoid.com/?name=yimberham&a=197382&start=0&chaos=ok