Detailing Simply

  • Reading time:1 mins read
  • Meteos: Columns channeled through Rez and Super Smash Bros. Melee. Good self-image. Lots of heart. Lots of modes. Lots of fun. A very giving game, and doesn’t ever treat you like an idiot. Great store.
  • Touch Kirby: Decent idea, conceived and executed as well as it might be. Spread too thin. Cloying. Beginning to bore me, after two worlds. Too Nintendoey. Don’t like the store.
  • Trace Memory: Some interface and design issues; linear; very, very short. Beautiful game, refreshing character design. Often clever. Greatly underestimates its welcome. My favorite of the batch.
  • Lost in Blue: Doesn’t even pretend to hold your hand. You will die. Terrifying. Also seems good so far. Scared to go back to it.
  • Trauma Center: Under the Knife: Basically a dating sim where you cut people up. Tense and exhilirating, even though there’s not much to do in it. Scary too, kind of.
  • Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow: Very pretty. Best main theme since Circle of the Moon. The rest of the music’s well-done, too. Kind of hard. Level design only interesting in the first part. IGA’s random use of monsters is starting to annoy me.

I want Goonies III for this system.

The Darkness Between the Pixels

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I think what’s so attractive about old nes games is, it’s just popped out to me, how dark they all feel — just a little surreal and a little mysterious. Blaster Master and Simon’s Quest and Zelda and Metroid — there’s so much which can’t be seen — you don’t know what anything is, and have to fill it in for yourself. All of the creatures in Blaster Master are a flat gray. The colors in Zelda are completely two-dimentional blobs; it has indistinct sound effects and rocks which look like turtles. Metroid is all black and empty, as is Blaster Master — and, actually, lots of Zelda and Simon’s Quest, really. They feel. . .unexplored. There could be anything in any niche. It’s like a dream. . .

With today’s games, you see everything and you know where and what everything is. The jellyfish in Blaster Master Look like the Metroids. Goonies II — well, that’s a strange one. It sort of overproves the point.

Life Force and Gradius. . .

The games which were hardest to play, I think, were the darkest ones — Gradius and Metroid and Castlevania 1; all great, but all kind of depressing. The games of today are… Microsoft/Apple spawn. They don’t feel real because they’re made to feel too real. Old NES games are like a dark fantasy — they feel so unreal that the mind makes them more real and alive than anything today could strive to be. And they’re mostly smaller than this text. . .