Do you remember when I posted about a new IF magazine about theory and criticism? The first articles are coming very soon. Please look forward to it!

So about that Avatar game. I have some thoughts. Before I can get into those thoughts I need to preface this with;

I do not care whether or not you find James Cameron's Avatar movies and their plots boring. I do not care if you did not connect to those characters. I need you to understand that I am looking at this game as its own work of art, separate from the movies and their production.

Now, with that out of the way, Frontiers of Pandora. It's kind of underwhelming, huh?

First, let's get the praise out of the way. The construction of the world and its biology is pretty amazing. The creature design and flora design is wonderful, you can see that that's where the input from Lightstorm Entertainment (James Cameron's production company) was most actively going. The game world is beautiful, it looks and feels exactly like Pandora, I have no complaints there.

The combat gameplay is okay. I find Ubisoft's combat mechanics range from okay to very fun, and this time I think it's closer to okay than very fun. The reason for that is, that while the archery and gunplay plays okay, there is no real melee combat, and worse, the stealth is straight up unplayable.

The stealth relies on a hacking minigame a lot, which gets super unwieldy when you're trying to hack a dozen enemy mech suits, but they all keep moving away from range before you can finish the minigame that takes way too long to complete, for a minigame that happens in real game time. And in addition the enemy AI seems to spot you way easily, often it feels like the combat areas don't have enough covers in their geography. In short, stealth, something that would have added some much needed variety to the combat gameplay, is unplayable as it currently exists.

But this isn't what's really been eating at me, oooh no. If you know me, you know that I am not so much a gamer, as I am an enjoyer of stories who tolerates video games around them. Sometimes even enjoys them, to be honest. So I invite you to join me, and hear the gospel that I now have to share about the state of the story of Avatar Frontiers of Pandora.

It falls so damn flat!

I feel like this is a game that really could have actually benefitted from the game mechanic in recent Ubisoft games, which admittedly is often quite performative, wherein the player is given some dialogue choices, usually mainly for flavour. The choice to say a thing this way or that way. To be clear, the story should still remain linear, since clearly that was the intention. But by giving the player character that small subtle choice, the game could have alleviated its biggest flaw, which is that it failed to make me care.

It failed to make me care about the various members of the Aranahe and the Zeswa clans. It failed to make me care about the PCs own childhood friends. It failed to make me care about the members of the Resistance, and it failed to make me care about the villains. And I am predisposed to caring. I like Avatar, I think it's cool. I think Pandora is cool. I thought The Way Of The Water managed to deepen the characters of Cameron's existing movie, while also making me care about at least 5 completely new characters, and one old previously quite one dimensional character. A villain! That movie was packed with a lot of cast and it still took the time to allow me to connect with every one of those major characters. So why won't this video game?

The player character's (who I will from now on refer as the Sarentu) childhood friends would have been the natural characters to focus on during this game. You are literally kidnapped, taken to a reservation school to be groomed, and witnessed the Sarentu's sister being murdered by your kidnappers together. That event should have been something to continuously haunt the Sarentu and their friends' journey. But the death of the Sarentu's sister is something that is only mentioned off handedly a few times in the early game. The Sarentu meets many Na'vi who have had loved ones die by human hands, and yet not once have I heard the Sarentu say "I know that grief too friend". Shouldn't that have come up at least once with Etuwa, whose mother's ghost is one that haunts the main quest of the Aranahe? This is where the option for the player to have flavour choice might have come in. You could have had the option to share the story of your sister with Etuwa, or her father, or choose not to.

The childhood friends the Sarentu escapes with quickly turn into an after thought. They hang around the Resistance Base doing fuck all. Which is infuriating, when the game already did the work of setting each of them up enough to give them a clear internal conflict they are all dealing with on their own. I really expected to see them way more in the story, with the way the beginning set it up. But they hardly even comment on the various things happening around them. I would have thought they would at least have an occasional opinion to share, as the story progressed. So far I've only experienced one side quest, after the initial scene with all of you connecting with the Tarsyu flower, where Teylan turned up on location as a surprise, actually outside the base.

The Resistance itself seems to be trapped in Dyer's Bowl, despite the Sarentu eventually rediscovering many of their former bases, and bringing them back online. But no one ever turns up at those bases, they only serve as stashes and fast travel points.

What is sorely lacking from the story of Frontier's of Pandora is some kind of an emotional connection between the Sarentu and the characters that they meet. That is to say, the emotional connection is right there, in the grief over the dead sister and the reclamation of their stolen culture, but the game rarely if ever allows the Sarentu to express that.

And despite what many people think about the movies, Avatar is and always has been a character focused story. Yes, the message of that story is hugely environmentalist and anti-capitalist, but it was still always told through character drama. It's just that the environment surrounding those characters is a character of its own, and in Frontiers of Pandora the character that got the most screen time.

Persona 3 Reload is the biggest fucking letdown. I thought it was going to be including a fem MC like the portable version did, it doesn't.

You'd think that if they were able to fit all the extra changes and relationship mechanics and dialogue to the miniaturized and condensed version of the game, they would easily be able to add it to the remake. Especially given it's 2024 and it's about fucking time JRPGs let you actually play a fem MC.

No they keep using the same old fucking decades old excuse of "it's too hard to add to the game". I'm so fucking tired of that excuse. And it especially falls short when they literally had all the same fucking framework and they could have just...added it.

Like the game literally starts off by assigning a male MC to a GIRLS DORM. But you can't play a woman, or at the very least a female presenting person.

Why would they chose to do that? And then refuse to add the mechanics of playing as a girl, mechanics and script and voice acting they could've just remastered or copied directly.

No, they gave us representation with the barest bones version of the game and ripped it away for absolutely no reason when they had the chance to make a full game again.

And yes, I understand Persona 3 Portable was a remake of the original. But the point is not that they stay 100% faithful to the original. Why add that to a remake, see how beloved it was, and then remove it? Game devs continued to be terrified of tits and pussy and continue make the laziest excuses for not adding them to games.

While I've often joked about hating videogames, there are many who claim my feelings are all too sincere, and those claims have increased since I returned to writing game reviews. Of course, I love many games, but here's the rub - the ones I love are the wrong videogames. 

Inspired by an amusing interaction I had in the wake of my Dead Island 2 review, I got to thinking about what is really meant when a critic is accused of hating the very medium they criticize. It's led to some interesting new perspectives on people who complain about game reviews.  

for an awful lot of reasons, the notion of the "Paperclip Optimizer" has a lot of purchase right now. it's the precursor to what eventually might be "grey goo" or per the Culture novels a "hegemonizing swarm", a dumb system designed to do nothing but expand its capacity to convert everything into a reflection of its initial programming, i.e., turn all the matter in the universe into paperclips.

there was even a web game about it!

this article I wrote a couple years ago is about that game. I think it's worth reposting now cause people keep talking about the paperclip optimizer as a parable about dangerous dumb systems. and that's true, that's what the game is about! the game is very much a deliberate allegory meant to explain why you should support "friendly AI" grifters!

what this article proposes is: maybe you shouldn't do that, actually, because behind every "rogue AI" is actually some capitalist somewhere making a decision to make All The Money, damn the consequences. this is an article about playing Universal Paperclips radically wrong--both radically wrong mechanically, and radically wrong emotionally. what I think falls out when you shake the game that way is a lot of unstated assumptions about shit that's acceptable for human beings to inflict on each other but somehow monstrous when a machine is doing it.

like, I get that we're all attempting to be more materialist in our analysis and that's good, but sometimes it feels like we're sliding into a kind of Lovecraftian understanding of the corporation, like it's just this incomprehensible machine working for itself. but at every stage there's people making decisions and they COULD be held accountable! and also, there's a designer of this game making decisions about where to put content emphasis, in order to put a finger on the scales of the parable. you don't HAVE to inflict mind control drones on humanity in the game any more than people HAVE to use deceptive advertising practices.

and by the same token like, it's actually perfectly reasonable for someone who isn't in STEM to look at a search engine spitting out wrong results and say hey, this search engine is bad! you can say "ah but technically machine learning is not intended to output correct results, you've made a Category Error" all you want; a human being sold this to other human beings as an intelligent search engine, and that sale was based on a whole series of lies. the technical explanation can be helpful, but it's not the point. the point is that a human attempted to harm other human beings with technology, something we've been doing roughly since the opening sequence of 2001 A Space Odyssey.

anyway there's a lot of weird maybe kinda heterodox perspectives in this article that I still haven't really seen anywhere else but that still really guide a lot of my thinking about this tech. read it if it sounds interesting I guess!

Here’s my personal recommendation of a YouTube video to check out:

The issue that arises when a game gets super popular is that other developers will try to make games in that style, by taking the basis of the game (ex. Open world, rougelike) without thinking about or realizing what the game does well that makes it popular

I have a lot of thoughts about Bombrush Cyberfunk and trying to make a spiritual successor to a game over twenty years later. I love Jet Set Radio Future and when I saw the screenshots for Bombrush I thought it was going to be great, these are people who get the aethetic of Jet Set. The music was great, it was gorgeously cel shaded, the environments I saw looked like a playground. I slammed it into my wishlist and bought it release day. My enthusiasm for the game died in a thousand little cuts as I played it. I want to explore why, because I generally like when games get more modern! We made dogshit games in the past and Jet Set has its share of dog shit parts, no one enjoys Pharoah Park.

Let's start with movement. You start the game with no wheels on your feet. This is a skating game and that choice feels strange out the gate. In fact before I get wheels I get a boost pack. I was excited by the boostpack at first. It felt like it would give some fine control with how I could move laterally where I needed to.

I was wrong.

The boost pack existing damns the level design of Bombrush. Jet Set has lines of places to swap from grind spot to grind spot, letting you not touch the ground for long stretches if you want. It's great, makes you feel smart and observant when you get to the bottom of Dogenzaka the first time with never leaving a rail.

Bombrush's lines all require trial and error with a finicky boost pack that has two ways to boost you and neither work as well as you want. You have a short boost that doesn't lose altitude. It does however reset all your momentum. And it plays awfully with the camera. The camera wants to look a certain way, even when you're trying to do a plant to aim yourself. This leads to jumps that should he easy being impossible the first so many times because you can't aim properly. You have to trial and error to a landing. This murders your momentum.

The other function of the boost pack is to let you glide. It's not an accurate way to describe what happens but it feels like developer intent. Instead you drop rapidly as you gain a disappointing horizontal distance. The boost pack does not help you go vertical. This is another frustration. Maybe later you get that. I doubt I will find out without someone telling me.

How does this damn the level design? All the pieces of your playground get cut up and thrown far from each other because you are expected to boost jump between them. The boost pack which I thought would add fine control is too unpredictable and hard to use for this purpose. The lines are not visually distinct and the levels feel disjointed. I didn't have fun navigating around as I had to dedicate more time to scouting lines before starting. Which leads to one of Jet Set's problems that Bombrush exacerbated: grinding.

Grinding is king in Jet Set. It's how you het everywhere. It's easy scoring. It's the resource efficient way to get speed. Bombrush made it worse. The points weren't that major in Jet Set until the post game but you could accumulate high scoring points just stringing tricks together. This is not the case in Bombrush. Tricks give a pitrance of ppints and multipliers come from few sources. The best way to get multiplier? Leaning into turns on grinds whole not changing tricks. Changing tricks is rhythmic, it's fun and it gets you boost meter. You do not get multiplier changes if you lean into a turn while doing a trick. This sucks. This doubly sucks because the way I fought the first two gangs involved earning points and you only have a chance at this is with multiplier.

Speaking of fighting gangs, the mehtod of fighting them is simpler than Jet Set. You go to a neighborhood, you spray over their graffiti until individual members show up. You follow their routine and run them off. Repeat until you can do the big gamg battle. It's just earning points. Jet Set at least changed up the ways you did this. You raced Beat and Poison Jam. You followed a line for Combo. You played capture the flag with rapid 99. You played a weird ball race against fake Yoyo. The lack of variety off the bat there was disappointing.

If I planned this I would transfer to talking about gang design but I want to talk about one more mechanical thing not tied up in character design: fighting cops. You get actually fight the cops directly in this game. It sucks. Kicking cops is treated as doing tricks, which means you could theoertically combo cops for points. Unfortunately the knock out blow on a cop always breaks your combo. And it just lacks the charm of body slamming a cop at mach 2 then spray painting them. The cops in Jet Set are scripted, only showing because of playing the game and then fucking off when the encoutner is done. It's a nice way to break up the pace of the game.

Bombrush decided to have scripted encounters with cops but to also have cops be a punishment for playing the game. There is a GTA heat system. Level one randomly happens for spray painting graffiti. From star one on your game gets progressively more annoying to play. You get level two almost immediately. This makes turrets pop put of the ground that fire chains ehich latch onto you and restrict your movement.

In my skating game.

This sucks.

The turrets also are the only way to access certain graffiti points, so you have to remember where those points are and book it there while the game sends infinite cops at you. Then after you do that you have to get the cops to go away. Especially since you can't change characters while the cops are after you. There is exactly one way to rid yourself of cops, go to a portapotty and change your outfit. And once you do the fucking thing locks and you have to find another one. They are not labeled on your map. Neither is the place you do character select.

Which if like me you want to play as the woman because you hate being forced to play a dude, is a massive pain in the ass. They wrote the story about Red and goddamn will they force you to play as him at every opportunity. You have play an entire area and then a chunk of another to unlock character select. This sucks. Meanwhile in Jet Set I never got forced to play someone unless I played YoYo up to the point he goes away. And when you unlock another character it's your save point that you desperately sprayed and is highlighted on the map you need. Bombrush has checkerboard dance spots. I never unlocked another character beyond the other two members of the starting crew. And Bel just isn't gender enough.

What is the iconic gang of Jet Set? It's Poison Jam. They're freaks. They dress weird, they're evil and live in the sewer. They're also one of only two gangs of super freaks you see. Every gang is full of freaks but in a subdued way. Rapid 99 is beloved because of their beef with Poison Jam while also being somewhat normal looking. The GG's are full of freaks but in a cool fashion sense not all of them looking like supervillains.

The gangs I saw in Bombrush were all Poison Jam levels of design. You have Frankenstein wannabes, then cybergoth astrology weirdos and then 90's web browser helmet cyborgs. The main antagonist has an army of cloned women. It's weird. It's all escalation and no breathing room. And I didn't even get fun freaks to also play as while I went.

The game lacks a huge personality to get me to care about the world. It doesn't have to be DJ Professor K but it needs something, a person excited to talk to me about the weirdos running around. Instead other than the musicians the dialogue is all text with occasional mismatched voice lines to the text. This is whatever but with a lack of any characters that are more than a cool design and gimmick it really hurts.

Why am I writing this? I don't super know other than the fact that the game made me think a lot about why I loved Jet Set and how maybe modernization doesn't make a game better. That modern axioms that you need more movement options aren't always good. That the jank of old game limitations added to the charm of a game and made it beloved. That trying to capture that magic of an old game is really fucking hard and trying to innovate on it without abandoning the soul of what it was. And that putting down a post to sleep and coming back later fucking killed my train of thought.

joystick system diaries - June 29, 2023 - storytelling and open world games

Okay so, I (Audrey) was going to make this into, like, a video thing with a video format, so that we could have something up this month. However, I just now realized that I fucking hate it. I hate the idea of editing this brain soup into a video. I hated reading this out loud. I hated listening to our voice reading this out loud. I fucking hate the whole thing.

I fucking hate everything that we have written lately. Everything we write is bad. I hate it. I just want to be rid of it

so. Here! I guess. I'm getting rid of it. Here's the whole written thing. It's about how Fallout New Vegas is actually not all that great. I guess reblog it if you think Fallout New Vegas is not actually all that great. Or don't! Meow.

I think you should give us money on Patreon or Ko-fi so that we hopefully write a little more (and one day, better?) while eating a little more and being slightly less mentally ill

Lately, we’ve been playing Fallout: New Vegas. It’s a game that a lot of people like. It’s a game that a lot of trans women like. It’s also a game that a lot of trans women do not like. One of those trans women happens to think that they're not sure if they like Fallout New Vegas, but that maybe, Fallout New Vegas is boring!

I finished a playthrough of it a few weeks ago, and found that the whole thing was just not very, whelming. It has walking, it has dialogue, it has an ending. It has a bunch of tasks that you can do, which leads to more walking, and more dialogue. And, sure, the tasks are well organized, in a sensible manner for this type of game- you start by getting an objective to go to a place and find a person, by meeting a person, who refers you to a person, who refers you to another place with another objective and that place takes you to another person, and so on and so forth until you arrive at the last person, one of these fuckers, who gives you the last place, Hoover Dam, with the last objective, shoot some of these other fuckers with these other people.

So, sure, it works as a video game that takes you from thing to do to thing to do without leaving you scratching your head, but this doesn’t really make for a story. It makes a bunch of pieces of a story that you can kinda pull together. I guess. So well. That’s why after blitzing through the game to get to the independent route and having the game pat me on the back going like, “oooh, good job! you won!” Just sorta rang like… “excuse me?”

What’s the point of open world games, anyway. Why does everything have to be open world. Like, medium open world, like a semi-open overworld that just, offers an intentionally designed explorable but eminently manageable place that exists to connect the gameplay and provide a little narrative context, but doesn't awkwardly stretch on into infinity. Sonic Adventure, Psychonauts, Yakuza. That kind of open world is nice. But the big open worlds that are just like, hey, here’s a huge field, huge city, huge place that is just huge for the sake of being huge. Why do we need this?

I don’t know, if people enjoy sandbox playgrounds, I guess, whatever- but I can say this much, and it’s just, open world games aren’t a great vehicle for storytelling. How the fuck are you supposed to tell any kind of coherent story when the way it’s presented is as dialogue nuggets dripfed to players as they fuck around? Like, Sonic Frontiers, for instance, is what I’d say is one of the few examples of this done well, and it has some really good dialogue written by Ian Flynn, one of the writers of the Sonic comic books everyone likes. This good dialogue is not really well serviced by the structure of this game, where Sonic is ostensibly under a time pressure to go rescue everyone but can in actuality fuck around infinitely. Like, a lot of the best bits of dialogue are from idle dialogue you get standing around, but no one is going to just stand around in this game unless they’re specifically waiting for the dialogue. So. The way you’re going to get a good story in this game is by, y’know, not fucking around. Going and doing the objectives. And I guess, fishing, so that you can unlock the egg memos, that Big the Cat inexplicably has. So.

So yeah, Sonic Frontiers, cool game, good story, and the open world is made tolerable by having Sonic, be fast. I like the Sonic video game. But this could’ve pretty easily been presented in a Sonic Adventure 1998 but updated, format, with a world that was only as big as it needed to be, and discrete memorable stages, like, y’know, a regular 3D Sonic game, and that would’ve been cool, but instead it’s, big field. And now the next game, probably, has to be big field. Except maybe the Generations/Forces asset use in those cyberspace stages will get itself replaced with some new stages, or at least, like, new assets for new stage themings, and that’d be nice.

Um, what else has happened lately? We’ve been watching a lot of anime and reading manga, I guess. We’ve been watching a lot of movies. We watched Kiki’s Delivery Service. We watched Across the Spider-Verse, and it was great and everything. I have mildly complex feelings about the spider-people being cop kids from cop families, and the flag on the wall owned by one of the cop kids with the cop dad leading everyone to mass headcanon her as trans, but y’know what, whatever. I can wait to talk about that.

We watched Bound. That was cool. That movie’s got a couple lesbians in it. Literally a couple, of them, y’know.

Oh, and also, we’ve been reading a few really good yuri manga. So, y’know what, I think I’m going to write about those later.

Might make this a series. Maybe. We’ll see.

Y’know, y’know what’s what, with the Patreon thing, and the Ko-fi thing, and with how we always need money, so I’m just going to, skip that. This time. Check the description or the comments or whatever.

Bye.

Oh, um, setting aside what I said about New Vegas, our friend, colleague, and unofficial teacher, Talen Lee, wrote a post about New Vegas. It’s a nice interesting little piece that talks about the value of memes. Okay. Bye for real now.

Lvl 2: The Sims 4 & How It's Resisting Gender Binary Norms

Ready, player?

The video game industry has had an interesting history with gender, sexuality, and gender representation to say the least. But one game in recent years has had a firm footing in capturing life outside of heteronormativity.

For today I want to talk about one of my favorite games, The Sims 4.

So let's get into it :)

Since the first release of The Sims franchise in 2000, the game has been evolving its inclusivity: The Sims 1 allowed same-sex relationships, The Sims 2 allowed same-sex sims to have a “Joined Union” (marriage but not really), and The Sims 3 finally ‘legalized’ same-sex marriage.

Despite these inclusive implements, the gameplay didn’t exactly SIMulate all walks of life. Until The Sims 4.

For gender expression, The Sims 4 hadn’t really explored much beyond gender binary norms. Prior to 2016, the players were allowed to customize their sim’s walk style before their sim’s gender.

The Sims 4’s massive ‘Gender Update’ expanded the boundaries of gender expression. Customizable options (like hair, clothes, and accessories) in CAS that were previously locked behind male/female frames were now available for players to use regardless of their sim’s frame. The Sims Team even took a step further and allowed players to customize their sim’s ability to get pregnant or not as well as separate the sims frame from their gender, which was an insanely awesome feature for them to add.

In other words, they allowed for sims to be super queer and didn’t determine gender based on the sims frame or their gender expression.

And this is important: Pushing the boundaries of heteronormativity and the gender binary is ethical and inclusive, allowing for other people to be, to share their identities in games which are often exclusive in representation. If popular media, like video games, were unafraid to implement more boundary-less characters and language then I think more people would be open to learning (and accepting) queer life.

But there was still work to be done. Although players were allowed to create and represent queer sims visually in CAS and explore queer relationships in Live Mode, there still was an issue with pronouns in text-based notifications and gameplay. If the players wanted to have a gender-non-conforming sim they would still have to use he/him or she/her pronouns.

Sooo, the they/thems or neo-pronouns were practically non-existent in the Sims 4 for another 6 YEARS.

In 2022, The Sims 4 released its pronoun update that allowed players to choose their sim’s pronouns and even go as far as to write in their sim’s pronouns. This allowed players to create sims that had neo-pronouns, multiple pronouns, and they/them pronouns. Finally…

Then earlier this year on July 28th, The Sims 4 launched their sexuality update that allowed players to fully classify and customize their sim’s sexuality. So, instead of all sims being coded as pansexual and fraternizing with ANY sim regardless of gender/sex, sims were now able to be classified as strictly attracted to male, female, all sims, or even no sims at all. So, sims can now officially be asexual!

Throughout the year The Sims Team has also added customizable options for sims in CAS like binders and top surgery scars. Hopefully, they’ll start working on the makeup from masculine frame sims soon…

What do you think? Do you think The Sims has done a good job of expanding on gender expression? Are there any other games that do this? Drop a lil comment down below :)

Works Cited Image Cited: Broverman, Neal. “Sims’ Trans Characters Have Christian Zealots Seeing End of Days.” Advocate.com, 7 Feb. 2023, www.advocate.com/transgender/sims-trans-characters-have-christian-zealots-seeing-end-of-days.

Ok so I’ve played Devil may cry 1 for about 2 hours now and I’ve just gotten to the part where you kill the lava spider for the second time and kill it for real (I think?) and I have some thoughts.

Overall the game is fun but clunky obviously i am giving it some leeway due to it being a game from 2001 but it still doesn’t mean it’s problems aren’t a big deal.

The opening is incredible it’s late 90’s / early 2000’s as fuck and I love it

However the tonal shift of the opening too the game is very jarring, it sets it up as a constant action adventure game and then boom your in resident evil. This isn’t a problem as I have no problem with RE but you could replace Dante with an RE protagonist in the environments from the game and I would think your just in a resident evil game.

Also the camera , yeah no camera control in an action hack and slash game is really rough Especially considering this game makes you do some hard jumps for secrets and most egregious of all enemies and bosses can hit you between camera positions which sucks ass and makes some bosses very clunky.

Onto the actual combat which to no suprise is the best part you have tons of moves that allow you to decimate hordes of enemies and knocking them to the air is really satisfying and the combination of guns and melee combat is great too basically no complaints here.

Now onto the bosses, so far they kind of suck the game reuses them a lot I’ve fought giant enemy lava spider twice and had two encounters where I run away from it and the very bad boy shadow wolf I’ve fought twice and it’s fight is very frustrating I only realised later that the reason it keeps draining my health is it counters every melee attack I make and that your supposed to attack with melee. My favourite boss so far was the black knight guy he was fun to fight. But easily the worst boss so far is the stupid scissor man guy you fight in the sewers. Your confined in a small space and you can’t hit him most of the time because he goes into the walls and he flies so you have to jump to hit him. Genuinely super frustrating fight.

But that’s not the biggest problem, that’s the life system which is completely pointless and just exists to waste your tame. Basically when you have lives you respawn at the last checkpoint but when you don’t have lives you restart at the beginning of the level. This isn’t too bad because the levels are quite short but when you have a boss encounter at the end of the level then when you die you have to restart the whole level meaning I have to do the whole level again before I can get back to the boss. It just wastes my time it’s clearly a leftover from earlier game design ideologies but it’s inclusion in this game really hurts the experience. Also the lives don’t replenish either you have to buy them meaning that I have less money to buy new moves hurting the part of the game I actually like the combat.

Overall I still like the game it’s fun but clearly it hasn’t aged well in alot of aspects once again I’m only two hours into the game so there is plenty of room for it to improve. I know later games in the series like dmc5 are awesome so I expect that the games will improve as I play through them.

Also last side note in Dante’s inventory is a medallion of Dante and Vergil and it’s funny cause I know he’s gonna show up later in the story to kick my ass.

One of my A Mind Forever Voyaging pieces got mentioned in Critical Distance's "2023 in videogame blogging." Don't see a lot of text game writing out there in mainstream video game discourse. Feels good!

It has a Kierkegaard quote and everything, very classy.

"The game practically makes you rely on the sleep item for this boss!"

-Vlogger on Dorgog the Sleep-Vulnerable, boss of the Sleep Item Bin Dungeon

my favourite games to parry in, in my own experience;

- lies of p

love this game, really introduced me properly to the parry mechanic and made me fall in love with it. feels smooth and intuitive, sound effect is crisp and rewarding, feels great overall 10/10

- jedi fallen order

idk if this counts as a soulslike or not, but ive just gotten into it and the parrying feels really smooth and intuitive too, will see if this changes the further i progress/on harder and easier difficulty modes. 8/10

- elden ring

sadly, so far at least i find i don’t really like the parrying mechanics in actual fromsoft games. it feels clunky and off, i really hate the lag between pressing the button and when the parry connects. parry windows feel inconsistent even on the same enemy type. its doable obviously but does not feel nearly as nice or rewarding as the games above. 5/10

- bloodborne

in general idk if this game is for me. for a game that heavily encourages you to parry, it feels clunky and the parry windows feel inconsistent. you only have a limited amount of times you can parry, and it feels odd that the parry weapon is long ranged, but the visceral openings are so narrow. maybe im being too harsh, but i really don’t enjoy it. honestly, ive stopped parrying altogether. the whole game feels clunky, i can only hope its just because its older and if they ever did a remake or sequel, i would understand the hype. 3/10

(i’ll probably add to this later. i understand i probably need to try sekiro before shitting entirely on fromsoft’s parry mechanics lol)

I wrote about Final Fantasy XVI and what I think made it so unsatisfying for me. Spoilers ahead, but check it out if you are interested in any of the following:

Analyzing the intersection of narrative and gameplay

Thinking about crystals and/or extremely poorly-handled metaphors for slavery and genocide

Numbers that don't mean anything

Complaining