So last night I was part of mostly spectated a discussion on Twitter about the game Divekick. This may or may not have been caused by statements I made earlier that day suggesting that Noah Sasso’s BaraBariBall was, perhaps, a bigger success at taking a core fighting game idea and turning it into something broadly accessible by simplifying it.
Screenshot from “Divekick”
The resulting conversation… well, you can start at this tweet and read your way down (and down, and down, and down) if you’re interested in how it went. I tried to keep my contributions to a minimum. Why? Because I could kind of tell up front that having a 140-characters-at-a-time asynchronous argument with Divekick‘s creator/director was going to head off the rails fast and, with all apologies to the brave soul that is Joel if he’s reading this, it kinda did.
I decided today that I wanted to get my thoughts out there in blog form, not to protect myself from argument, but so that I could maybe try to articulate what I felt in greater than 140 character chunks. If you’re interested in what I think on the matter, then feel free to check after the break:
So, this semester I’m teaching a course on “Game Design for Expression.” It’s really more of a class on how students — especially students with no technology or game background — can make small, personal games. I’ve been fortunate to have a lot of guest speakers willing to talk about their work, including Mattie Brice, Samantha Allen, and most recently, Will O’Neill, the creator of Actual Sunlight.
That game, like Depression Quest, is one that I deeply respected based on what I’d heard about it, but in the end couldn’t play, because I wasn’t in an emotional place where doing so would have been healthy. But I assigned it for my students this semester to play and discuss because I thought they would get a great lesson out of doing so. And because I’m their professor, I had to play it too, which I finally sat down to do on Tuesday night to be ready for Wednesday’s class.
This post is the story of how that went. Insofar as Actual Sunlight can be spoiled, this post will have them.
I had a brief conversation with Kris Ligman this evening about the Game Church, which led to me reading an interview they did with Steve Gaynor of Fullbright about Gone Home. In reading it, I had what the kids are calling “some feels” and while it won’t make a very long blog post (sorry America), it’s too longform for Twitter, and thus I resort to writing what should be a pretty short blog post.
As I am endeavoring to protect people from GH spoilers as far as I can, the rest comes after the cut:
Alright. So thanks to a gift from Maddy Myers, I went home. I had no plans to buy the game, mostly because “mansion games” (thank you Robert Yang) or “first person experiences” (thank you Cameron Kunzelman) aren’t my thing. I don’t really enjoy point and click adventures, or games where you progress by turning over every littlething until you discover the tiny clue that opens the secret staircase on level 5 that leads to the Haunted Donut Shop or whatever. I find them hard to engage with since I get little feeling of mastery from drudge work, and the payoff is almost always narrative information that I could easily read off a wiki page.
Now, before the pitchforks and torches come out, I am saying the game is not in my strike zone, NOT that the game is inherently bad. Please don’t roll up in my comments telling me how I’m an awful human being for not liking mansion/point-click games. I am begging you.
Right. That’s out of the way.
So the whole point of this genre, as I said on Twitter, is to find narrative things out through a carefully-crafted obsessive-compulsive disorder simulation. By necessity, discussing it without revealing any spoilers thus becomes impossible and has very real potential to deeply affect the game experience even for people who normally don’t have a real problem with spoilers (like myself).
Thus, vague impressions? Interestingly put together, ventures into territory not frequently touched by mainstream AAA games. Cohesive. This is the same response I had to Kentucky Route Zero and that seems pretty apt, all things considered. As I said on a recent Gayme Bar podcast, I found KR0 to be engaging but not necessarily fun/enjoyable. Gone Home made me feel similarly. I was pulled through it by powerful inertia but I wasn’t having a strong emotional response either way.
If you want to know more – SPOILERS ABOUND AHEAD — then check after the cut:
So Polygon reviewed DuckTales Remastered and then Twitter got ahold of it and, you know, stuff has happened. Since I’m trying to keep in the habit of blogging, I figured I’d write something about it, especially after I had an extended convo with Matt Bremner about it on Twitter earlier. Matt was pretty unhappy with the review, and on a few of the points he brings up I am totally with him on not being happy with the review. Of course on a few other points I differ, and that feeling of division is writ pretty large in the comments section of that review where nobody can make up their minds about anything other than the people on the other side being jerks.
But I feel like my now-boring-to-everyone battle with the death of Final Fantasy is orthogonal to what I have lovingly termed “Ducknado” because they both seem to deal with this notion of console nostalgia, what it does to us as consumers and to the industry as producers, and both its perils and its promise. If you want the short version, I’m scared that nostalgia is going to make DT:R “immune” to legitimate critique in the eyes of many, which is a dangerous place to be. If you want the long story, then check out what I’ve got to say after the cut.
This morning I asked on Twit-ar if people would be interested in hearing some discussion on The Wonderful 101‘s “Wonder Pink” character, which I knew comparatively little about until Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequency fame who mentioned it last night on Twitter:
I was interested in #Wonderful101 until I saw the Wonder-Pink trailer. She exemplifies everything NOT to do when creating female characters.
She then linked to the “intro” video for the character that gives her background, personality, weapon, etc. Take a look:
I watched it and then I pressed my fingers into my forehead and I let out a sigh and said “Oh, Platinum. Come on, guys.” Now, those of you who know me and/or my writing and/or have ever ever ever listened to Gayme Bar know that I love me some Bayonetta. And considering that both are Platinum Games characters with serious sexuality and gender representation issues (I love Bayonetta but that doesn’t stop me from noting problematic aspects) this might sound a little hypocritical, right? “Dude Wonder Pink bugs you but Bayonetta gets a pass?! WTF!”
That’s not an entirely unreasonable conclusion, but if I may, I think the scenarios are pretty different. Check after the cut to find out why:
Alright I promised I’d leave this alone but someone made a really great comment on that last post and I’m somewhat afraid that it might not get read. Plus it’s actually a somewhat different line of thinking from the “FF is dead (to me and only me)” line of thinking. Plus it’s a reason for me to talk about Final Fantasy X-2 so you know, there’s that.
Before the game came out, people claimed this was fake!
So if you don’t know much about the game let me set some important context for you. It has a “job”-swapping system, inspired by FF3/FF5, only unlike those games you can swap jobs (for those who REALLY don’t know, “job” is a pre-transliteration term for “class” in the D&D sense in many JRPGs) in combat on the fly. So if you’re rocking out, healing your allies up as a White Mage and then suddenly the monster-sniping skills of a Gunner are needed, BAM, you can change that, slipping into a whole new set of abilities instantly.
But the deal is, in the game’s fiction, “jobs” come in the form of “dresspheres.” Now, FFX‘s universe involves things called “spheres” that are basically a combination of camera, audio recorder, and pseudo-telepathic thought recorder. They’re palm-sized balls of… whatever filled with a swirling blue-white substance. In FFX they were a minor setting detail, the stuff of sidequests. In FFX-2 they’re a major plot point: now that the big bad that occasionally wiped out society from FFX is gone, the people of Spira (where the games take place) are interested in learning more about their history, and so uncovering spheres of the past gave rise to a special type of mercenary, “Sphere Hunters” that brave dangerous areas to find and retrieve these spheres. The game kicks off when Rikku finds a sphere of someone who looks like Yuna’s lost love interest Tidus from FFX, and Yuna becomes a Sphere Hunter to try and find him.
Now, the rest of this — including the actual, you know, content of this post — is spoilery for FFX-2 which is heading for an HD re-release, so the rest is behind the cut:
Okay I don’t like getting into blog fights where people asynchronously duke it out without ever engaging each other, but I don’t know Chris Kohler personally and I am… disinclined to battle it out with him on Twitter, 140 characters at a time, while I infuriate everyone who follows me, him, or both.
So when I read his response to critiques of his piece (including a post from a few days ago from yours truly) I realized I had to make another post if I wanted to engage with the ideas. I know this now paints me squarely (puns!) as an internet pedant who strives for the last word, and I am sorry. I would like to be better than that, but apparently I am not. Mea culpa.
I am very sorry
Right, so. To be brief, Kohler says that those of us who disagreed claimed he didn’t offer enough evidence (I don’t remember doing that, but who knows, I might have implied it!). Thus his argument in the rebuttal is his attempt to offer said evidence.
Needless to say I didn’t find it compelling. Why? Read on to find out.
Warning: I try to make things non-referency as possible but some fluency with the broad-scale events of the Three Kingdoms novel will be very helpful interpreting this post’s specifics.
Alright, so I’m actually a big Dynasty Warriors series fan. Almost all the Musou games, actually; the exception is Hokuto no Ken Musou (“Fist of the North Star”) and Troy Musou which are just kind of… too bloody for me. I guess considering I racked up 6000 kills in one battle of DW8 over the weekend that seems hypocritical? I’d like to think my aversion to video game blood is because I understand the consequences of RL violence rather than the other way around. Anyhow.
Much like my thoughts on Project X Zone, I don’t necessarily think New! Refreshing! Gameplay! Systems! is the draw of the Musou series (by the way, the word “Musou” is Japanese for “without equal/peer,” hence the Japanese name of the series, “Sangoku Musou,” means “One without equal in the Three Kingdoms”). In fact, much like I described PXZ as being, the Musou games have been a steady motion of iteration with increasingly small but steadily better changes… except DW6, which changed everything and which everyone pretty much hated. So there’s that. Rather, I think the fun of the games is seeing what twists on the theme the new game brings, what new characters become playable (or change), and that sort of thing. As someone who’s read the unabridged Three Kingdoms twice and abridged versions four times, I find the DW series to be like watching the campy anime version of this book I love.
Now, without implying that women characters are absent or unimportant in Chinese historical fiction — I don’t think that’s true — it is fair to say that women, as a whole, don’t play a lot of importance in the Three Kingdoms novel. Yet even back in the day when the first Dynasty Warriors, a 3D weapons fighter that wasn’t really very good but was fun in its own way, happened, Koei (and developer Omega Force) added one of the novel’s only prominent woman characters, Diaochan, as a fighter:
As far as playable fighting game women go, she’s not actually that bad. She’s not underpowered, she’s wearing a reasonable outfit, and the weapons she uses — called chúi — are not from the list of Approved Girl Fighter Weapons (e.g. whips, kitchen utensils). Her ending is a little groan-worthy but at least it directly refs her role in the novel. So what’s the problem? Well, if you want to know, read on after the jump:
Right so last night Riot Games researcher and smart guy Davin Pavlas and I had a discussion about Kanji Tatusmi, one of the main characters of Persona 4. Specifically we discussed some of the ways in which his personal story is interpreted along both sexual orientation and gender presentation lines, and along the way I aired a particular grievance I have with the way that Kanji is interpreted as a character.
If you want to skip this entire blog post you can get the gist from this Twitter thread of my convo with Davin but if you’re here for my typically verbose breakdown of something that gets on my nerves, grab some popcorn and let’s start.
(Spoilers for Persona 4 and Persona 4 Arena to follow, FYI)
Now, I am pretty sure most people with an interest in the topic of Kanji and P4 have seen this video:
What I want to tell you is: this video makes me want to punch a wall until my hand falls off. Here is why:
