Setting Boundaries

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

Back in my review of Daniel Remar’s Hero Core, I ruminated on the game’s unusually dignified management of the player’s progress. After the first ten or fifteen minutes, nearly the whole map is available to the player; from there the player’s exploration is bound and guided only by the logistics of the terrain and natural risk assessment.

Since games have gotten complex enough to involve multiple action buttons, large persistent maps, and countless variable flags, developers have done their best to keep the player from getting too far, too fast; from wandering outside the proscribed zones where the designer has accounted for all variables, or feels that the player can safely wander without getting frustrated or confused. Part of the idea is to to pad out the play experience, allowing the designer to spin a sense of scale and scope from a relatively small amount of material. Part of it is damage limitation, either for the player’s or the developer’s ostensible benefit.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Touch Survival Kids

  • Reading time:3 mins read

Lost in Blue feels a lot like Zelda 1. Same sense of constant danger, being stranded somewhere to fend for yourself. In Zelda the danger is mostly from monsters and things. Can’t explore too far or they’ll kill you. Have to work your way up. In Lost in Blue, the dangers are hunger, thirst, and exhaustion. I’m just gradually building myself up to explore further and further inland. I keep finding miraculous things like an empty glass bottle, washed up on shore, that lets me carry water with me. And long sticks, that I can fashion into spears. And logs, that I might be able to build something with eventually.

It’s a lot like the treasures in Zelda, which you just sort of find, and which mostly seem special because they’re something you found, that might help you, rather than because they’re the key that unlocks the next door that lets you go forward (as in the later games). Though they might have that effect, It’s not that direct.

I’m surprised the game doesn’t make more use of the touchscreen — even in the menus. Strange to have to actually press the start button when it says “PRESS START”. And it’s weird that you can’t just dump stuff on the floor of your cave. It’s not like the twigs would go anywhere. I can see a certain limit, like after a certain point the girl complaining that, what with her unable to see (you step on her glasses near the beginning), she’s liable to trip if you clutter the place any more.

I found raspberries!

Castlevania is… there. It is what it is. It’s another Castlevania. A pretty good one. I think my save file getting corrupted just soured me on everything. It was my own fault. I think I turned the system off while it was saving.

The first part of the game is wonderful. Then it gets boring. Then more boring. Then more boring. Then it gets better, then better, then more boring, then a little better. You actually aren’t ever in The Castle, as such. Though when you’re on the fringes of this mess of a hideout, things are much more well-defined. The level design is just really good in the first two sections of the game. And it looks interesting and has great music. The two towers are great. The best clocktower ever. And there are some great touches. In between, though…

The whole middle section is just monsters on shelves, that you cut through to get to the next room. It’s weird, because there are such good parts on either end. It’s like the level designers fell asleep for half the game. Maybe they just left the whole middle section open, figuring “we’ve got the outlines; we’ll fill the rest in later.” Then deadline approached, and they just went and scribbled in every middle square as quickly as they could. That the map is so well-conceived overall seems to support this impression.

I got disenchanted somewhere around the ballroom, and I don’t think I ever quite recovered. A shame, considering how much good there is here.

What’s so good about Dragon Quest games?

  • Reading time:4 mins read

There’s no nonsense to them. Keep in mind every other JRPG is a Dragon Quest clone, and has to contrive something to set itself apart from Dragon Quest. Draon Quest is, therefore, the fundamental game that everything else is a deviation from.

And there is a certain purity and wholeness to it, as an experience. It’s balanced for a certain sense of immediacy: all that matters is right now.

For the most part, the game realizes where its abstractions are and that they are abstractions. Although it’s mostly just statistics, fighting means something in and of itself: the stronger you get, the further you can safely explore. The larger your world becomes. It’s a barrier you must butt heads with if you want to grow. Nothing to glory in; it’s just a fact. This is compared to most RPGs where you fight to make it easier to beat upcoming bosses, or to level up for the sake of levelling up, or where fighting appears to be the whole point, for whatever reason, rather than a mere fact of exploration in dangerous places — and where you move forward to get to the next area and forward the plot and finish the game.

Its simplicity and its honestness really drive home how most other JPRGs have missed the point — by slapping on extra systems, extra layers of complexity just to make themselves different, trinkets, fetishes, by taking literally things that were abstract for a reason (like the numbers, or the concept of an “overworld”), by putting the focus on petty issues rather than practical ones.

When it comes down to it, Dragon Quest is about growing up, maturing, seeing the world. Experience has meaning, because the more experience you have the broader your world becomes. Money is practical because it allows you buy tools to help you in your travels.

You will constantly be hitting your head against your limit and being forced to go home, rest, recuperate. The next day you go out and hit the world again, a little wiser, a little stronger. Maybe today you’ll see something you never saw before.

That’s more or less the focus of every game. DQ8 makes it more clear by making trees trees, making mountains mountains, giving you a horizon and putting things on it to inspire you to go out and look for them. You will still keep having to go home. Stray too far, too quickly, and you will get in over your head and you will be in trouble. And you might just get killed. Yet that danger just adds all the more excitement to every day’s travel.

Curiously, if you can get around the interface issues (like having to choose “stairs” from a menu every time you want to climb them), the original Dragon Warrior has hardly dated at all. Again, that’s just a matter of the game’s fundamental simplicity. It’s like playing Super Mario Bros. or Asteroids. They’re all complete, as far as they go. Not as complex as current games, but so what. What’s complexity other than complexity. Compare that to Final Fantasy 1, which is pretty much unplayable by current standards. It just doesn’t know what it’s doing, or — more importantly — why it’s doing what it does.

When it comes down to it, playing Dragon Quest is a meditative experience. In Dragon Quest, things just Are. When you play, you just Are. It’s a game about Being. There’s no real goal; anything that the game might throw at you is a MacGuffin, really. Something to get you out the door. It’s a joyous game, a little melancholy, all about the patterns of life and change while always remaining the same. It’s happy simply to exist, and do what it does because that’s what it was put there to do. No ambition. No glory. No drama. Just a quest. A quest after dragons.

VROOM VROOM

  • Reading time:3 mins read

I picked up the GBC remake of the SFC remake of Dragon Warrior 1 & 2.

Gosh, the changes are nice.

Gosh, the game is easy now.

Really. I’m not sure what’s up with that. The game used to have the same syndrome as The Legend of Zelda and the first couple of Phantasy Stars, whereby the player was fenced in by impossible odds. Now one is more or less free to stroll at will. Money and experience are everywhere. Red slimes take one hit to kill at level one, where they take several in the original version. Or I seem to recall so, anyway. Not sure what to make of this quality.

However. Everything else is strangely just-right, in its tone and sensibility. I don’t recall much actual story in the original game. I don’t remember the townspeople saying much. Now they’re all miserable and scared and angry, and have halfway-interesting things to say about their own lives and problems. It’s all kind of bleak, yet strangely perfect. Then there are all of the little additions like the girl who finds the hero attractive and follows him around town for no other reason, which well illustrate the heart behind the game.

I thought I’d played this remake before. I don’t remember any of what I see, though.

This is nice.

I got it for eight dollars.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington sure ends abruptly. I haven’t seen a Capra movie since I was aware enough to appreciate one. Looks like I need to go back and take another look at It’s a Wonderful Life and It Happened One Night. Again with the little details, which give the piece life — the expressions and reactions of even the minor characters or the extras.

The Trouble With Harry is gorgeous; it’s one of the few pictures that Hitchcock mostly filmed on location, and it shows. It also shows when the movie jumps to a set, although not as disconcertingly as in, say, The Birds. The cinematography is brilliant. The script is interesting. Herrman’s score — his first, for a Hitchcock picture — is above-average for him. The wardrobe, with its light New England jackets and autumn gear, feels as real and refreshing as the scenery. The acting, save Shirley MacLaine, is terrible.

The script, although interesting, demands a certain degree of shrewdness in its players. It doesn’t work on its own. In the right hands, it could seem like genius. Here, it deflates into so much awkward air. A shame. A shame in general. Maybe it would have been better as a silent film.

On that note, I am almost convinced that the Coens intended Barton Fink to be in Black and White. Just look at the choices in cinematography. The use of light and dark. Then turn down the color dial on your TV. Suddenly, the movie commands about twice the power it did a moment before. there is so much less distraction. The nightmare logic all makes sense. Where before you might furrow your brow and wonder what just happened, now you accept without question. Maybe even nod.

It’s still a perplexing movie. I think I might like it. I’m not sure. I think I have to watch it a few more times. I’m not sure if I want to. I think I might.

So.