What follows is fast and loosely written because it’s on my blog, and I barely edit anything I post here. Also, I’m tired and I just spent three hours editing something else, so I’m rattling these thoughts off while they’re still fresh after finishing the game last night.
I could sit here and write an entire review of Capcom’s latest action-horror hit, but I’m not sure how much unique that I really have to say from a critical angle. It’s a loving look at the franchise whose story is so stuffed with connective tissue that you might end up staring down the gaping maw of the fan wiki trying to figure out where you remember what from in the story. I won’t say that it’s a game built out of fan service – even though there’s plenty – but one that is fully aware of its history, it’s legacy, and how those things have limited its growth.
Requiem is the third (and probably final) take on the style of Evil established by Resident Evil VII: Biohazard for the PS4/PC/X1, in that you play an old school puzzle box filled with monsters inspired by classic horror tradition. In a unique turn for the series, however, the classic horror in RE7 was Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I will never admit to being creeped out by zombies and carnivorous plants, but people from the American south are terrifying. Village on the PS5/XSX would bring the Hammer thrills with vampires and creepy doll houses.
A point of contrition for some would be that both of these games would eventually drop their aesthetics to remind everyone that these new titles still shared continuity with the earliest titles in the series, dragging the player into the silly science labs to tell the player why they are surrounded by goopy monsters and werewolves. Chris Redfield shows up, flexes his cartoonishly large muscles, and then the credits would roll. Requiem does not hide the science horror or its ties to series history. Our new protagonist, Grace Ashcroft is technically a take on the legacy sequel horror prominent in modern horror films — she’s the child of a character from an older game.
Let me tell you, folks…I don’t think I have a problem with that.
Frankly, I’ve never taken Resident Evil all that serious as a vehicle for storytelling. I fell in the love with the series when it was b-movie cheese, and I respect the fact that it never stopped being reeking of melted artificial cheddar. The original Biohazard was originally made out of the intent to revisit Sweet Home and director Shinji Mikami had no interest in the story of his horror project. Instead, where Resident Evil shined was its intersection of setting and mood, stellar game design, and a script so incredibly stupid that it crosses that thin line from awful to awesome.
Fun fact – I spent about thirteen years looking for this version of the game only to learn that it’s much, much harder than the Director’s Cut I’d played before it.
And then there were sequels. And a mountain of spinoffs. Charting the conspiracy board connecting all of the events in the Resident Evil canon is a work that only fan wiki editors could aspire to, and they have done so with aplomb. I genuinely admire the dedication it takes to document the narrative of something so innately silly as the Resident Evil series.
And that’s what has been on my mind for the last few days as I led Leon through the dusty remains of Raccoon City towards the end of the game. I am no longer the thirteen year old who scraped the cash together to sneak a copy of Resident Evil 2 into my house (my parents had already forbade me play Goldeneye following the typical American media response to the Columbine shootings, so this game would NOT have made it past the front door without subterfuge). That kid thought all of this poorly acted drama about a zombie virus and the people uncovering the actions of villainous scientists was compelling enough to play more games, to read a gloriously absurd novelization, to think about making video games as a profession.
This adaptation of the PS1 game is fucking inspired.
Resident Evil, as a running narrative, is very stupid. It’s cheesy. It’s the dumbest iteration of 1950’s science-run-amok sci-fi coated in buckets of gore. Every villain is stupid. Their plans are stupid. The outcomes are stupid. The characters are threadbare and some of them drop the silliest action movie one-liners this side of Commando.
But most of the games treat every single moment with cold sincerity.
So many contemporary schlock horror films present their low-budget cheese with a flaccid attempt to reach “so bad it’s good” status by birthright of being cheaply made and stupid. And those films are generally awful because they do not understand that an effort still has to be made.
Resident Evil does want you to care about all of the silly things that underly the experience of surviving against ambulatory balls of flesh and blood-soaked crawling humans whose brains are exposed. Requiem, in fact, expects that you already care about that long running back story enough to remember beats from spin off movies, online PS2 games, derided mainline entries, and the revered classics alike.
The benefit of video games, however, is how a game can connect us to a character enough that we do feel that closeness provided that the game is designed to develop that bond. Silent Hill 2 (original) does not want you to feel close to James Sunderland, so the camera is fully disconnected from him, adding to the Lynchian nightmare state that the game functions in. Resident Evil puts the players close enough to the character to feel a tension from navigating with tank controls and snapping three or four of our small pool of 9mm rounds, but far enough away to enhance the inherent power fantasy of 90s action games. It’s through this connection that we can care about characters, to want to keep them alive, to escape as the clock ticks down at the last few minutes.
Because it’s wonderful to care about these stupid, stupid people who are always running headlong into danger. I loved playing as Grace Ashcroft because she is an FBI agent who is clearly so unprepared for field work that she went out without a partner into a condemned hotel and got wrapped up in a horror hospital. That’s nonsense. That would never happen. No one would ever end up in this situation.
Thanks to a wealth of employee rewards points and a small trade in from my giant game library, I was able to pick up the Nintendo Switch 2 on launch day from my local GameStop. In the months since, I have played the hell out of the latest hybrid from Nintendo – a fact that doesn’t surprise me at all. After all, the first Switch shifted most of my gaming back to Nintendo, often at the expense of the experience. Certainly no one would recommend The Outer Worlds as a Switch game if they already have a PS4 or PC. And yet, that’s where I played it, completed it, and had an amazing time doing so.
I’m writing this roughly two months after the console released. My library has grown to five physical(ish…) titles, as well as upgraded versions of Tears of the Kingdom and the recently released Shadow Labyrinth. I’ve logged at least 300 hours finishing runs of Bravely Default, Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma, Mario Kart World, and I am deep into runs of Cyberpunk 2077 and Donkey Kong Bananza.
For my money and time, the Nintendo Switch 2 is everything I need a game console to be – a place to play video games, one that is flexible to meet my needs as a player. I can still carry this little thing with me to sit in the car line until my daughter gets out of school. It can go with me on trips. It can sit in the dock and keep me awake during long work shifts as I sit in my home office and try my best to stay conscious for incoming phone calls. It is one of several pieces of gaming hardware in my arsenal, and one that I welcome with open arms like I do any gaming platform that I play on.
This is why I’ve found myself frustrated with the conversation surrounding the console.
The Nintendo Switch 2 is not without fault. It would be foolish to say that it is a perfect device. I am not here to argue that the console couldn’t be better – the lack of hall effect sticks following a generation of hardware plagued by controller issues is grotesque to say the least, the incredibly high price tag for certain games is upsetting but not surprising in 2025, and the entire game key card debacle is heartbreaking on its own.
No, my issues with the conversation around the Switch 2 are cultural.
I’ve been trying to figure out how to approach this for the last two weeks, how to even organize my thoughts on this situation. I considered pitching this as an article to a few outlets but just decided not to. After all, this is going to be a bit of an “old man yells at cloud” bit of chatter.
So…let’s yell at some damn clouds, folks.
First off, if you are buying a console on launch day, you have disposable income that not everyone has. You are already privileged enough to make that expense and are willing to spend five-to-six hundred dollars to join a new console generation as early as possible. You do not represent most people. I do not represent most people. Most people did not buy over three hundred physically released Nintendo Switch 1 games, nor do most have as many wins on that platform as I do – over 200 games if you individually count every game I played including those on collection carts and the retro game services provided a Nintendo Switch Online account.
It doesn’t matter what console you play Cyberpunk 2077 on – someone’s gonna go on a little float.
So what are you here for, buying a console on day one? Are you a journalist writing about the console? Are you a streamer who will be playing games for a massive audience? Statistically, that’s not incredibly likely, given the millions of units of hardware already sold. No matter how you ultimately slice it, however, you are here to play video games. You are here to get in on the ground floor of a new generation of hardware from a legacy publisher that is responsible for decades of celebrated games. You want to play an entire era of new games.
When the Super Nintendo reached American shores in 1991, it released with a total of five games, one of which was packed in with the console. The Nintendo 64 released with two titles. The original Playstation launched with twelve games. While the Nintendo platforms launched with games that remained signature titles in their libraries, the Playstation did not. Tekken, Crash Bandicoot, Final Fantasy VII were all in the future of the system.
The original PlayStation would go on to dominate the console market, and ultimately change the course of evolution for console gaming going forth for better and worse.
No console is living to its potential on launch day. No console’s trajectory can be tracked from the moment of conception. There may in fact be a reality where the WiiU found its feet and became a dominant part of how we play video games, and I still think it had a lot of potential in a world where it failed!
And yet, the discussion is so frequently “the Switch 2 is underwhelming” or “its a failed launch.”
I’m left with two thoughts – that it’s speaking from the point of view that you can get the system and feel like you should be rewarded with more games, or that you need to churn out content to draw eyes to your website. Either is reductive. I’m also being reductive by talking about this divorced from any issues the system has – SEE GAME KEY CARDS, AGAIN!
The Sega Dreamcast would be a far more fair place to call a console launch contentious. The lineup was stellar, but it was plagued by discs that didn’t play. The Sega Saturn was a mishap at market in the US, so poorly handled that the console faced limited distribution. That’s a failure of business. Both consoles had stellar libraries that are still celebrated now, though that’s only true for the Saturn in Japan.
I can promise you that the actual audience for a game system is people who play video games. I play video games. My daughter plays video games. She loves Mario Kart World and we are playing Donkey Kong Bananza about 65% in co-op. We are having a blast. Again, I’m on my third RPG on the platform. Sure, I could have played two of them elsewhere, but that will bring me to my next point shortly.
A console launch is just a product going to a shelf. A video game console, to me, should be akin to buying a picture frame. You are buying a frame to display art. You are buying a game console to display art.
And that includes art that we haven’t even seen yet. New and beautiful art, old art given new life.
Part of the reason my Switch 1 library blossomed into the towering red beast in the corner of my office that it became is rooted in legacy rereleases. Publishers dusted off games like Cosmic Fantasy and put them back out into the world. You are never going to see Cosmic Fantasy listed among the best RPGs ever made, but you can play every single game in the series, most of them with the first English translation they’ve ever officially received.
I’ve already played ports of a 3DS game and a PS4/5 game on the Switch 2. I am watching the skies for whatever shooting stars will eventually reach my new console because it is here for me to experience art.
I am not going to sit here and worry about frame rates and incredible resolution. I do not care so long as the game functions, that I can experience the art buried in the code, the visuals, the music, the writing.
If we are going to convince the world that video games are an art form, we must stop treating their success about their commercial potential, and likewise, we must stop talking about the ways we play them in the same way.
The Switch 2 is a functional, iterative evolution of the original Switch. It plays games that I am enjoying. I don’t need anything more from it. From the point of view of one of millions of players, it is a console successfully launched.
…other than for Game Key Carts to burn in hell forever.
I remember the derisive way that mainstream gaming outlets used to write about JRPGs. For those of us with a fondness for turn based combat and overwrought melodrama, it was a difficult time to engage with the culture around videogames. It was disheartening to see an entire subgenre that I loved so completely rejected.
The tide was turning by 2012, however, and one of the indicators that the turn based console RPG could again thrive was Bravely Default: Flying Fairy, published by Square-Enix as a spinoff of Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light. Praised at the time for its impressive iterations on the combat seen in games like Final Fantasy V, it sold well enough to see two sequels, one on the 3DS, and another on the Nintendo Switch.
On the launch of the Switch 2, I took another swing at Bravely Default. I played it at one point several years ago, and kind of bounced off of it, eventually trading it in towards a black label copy of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. However, I had heard for over a decade that it was brilliant, a shining exemplar of the strengths of the genre, so it seemed fitting that I should give it another shot on my brand new console. It seemed a perfect choice to start my new console up with a new JRPG, even if it is a remaster.
Yes, I did buy 3DS remaster with my overpriced console.
This review will not engage with how much I am frustrated that it came on one of Nintendo’s Game Key Cards though. Long time readers can understand my frustration and also wonder why I was stupid enough to buy one of those anyway.
After ninety hours spent in Luxendarc, I can confirm that my feelings on the qualities of Bravely Default are, of course, complicated.
What’s Old is Still Old But Shinier
Bravely Default presents a familiar adventure – a party of heroes has to restore four elemental crystals to save the world, and acquire numerous additional jobs (here labeled asterisks) in order to grow in strength to overcome a series of increasingly difficult dungeons and some truly fantastic bosses. It is easy to quickly compare it to Final Fantasy V-they share a lot of DNA.
Hey, Ringabel, Flavor Flav called. He wants his clock back.
The difference between the two comes down to how they handle the theme of environmental destruction and how it is tied to the crystals. Final Fantasy V puts the onus of saving the environment on the people of the world, saying that our personal choices are what can bring the world back from the brink of destruction. It’s a very 1990s view on environmentalism.
Bravely Default isn’t convinced.
Bravely Default can be broken down into six sections. The first chapter of the game brings the party together, and sets them out on their journey to save the crystals. The next four chapters brings them to each of the other four continents, where they meet the leaders of each country, and how they are exploiting the decay of the crystals for different ends.
It makes for a compelling journey in the first fifty-to-sixty hours. The machinations of evil were not so grand as the world annihilating threat of Exdeath, instead providing more immediately relatable woes for the people of Luxendarc. The people of Ancheim are forced into labor in exchange for expensive drinking water. Florem is a city celebrating beauty, but the people are clamoring for products that are designed to make them ever more vile to one another. A civil war has broken out in Eisen.
But its the final act of Bravely Default where I’m torn.
Eternal Recurrence
No game needs to run a certain amount of time to be fulfilling. Chrono Trigger is still considered one of the finest games ever, and it can be finished in full in around twenty hours. It also feels like a massive game despite this.
Bravely Default is not sharing this feature with Chrono Trigger.
Before I get too negative, I want to note that I did really enjoy my journey through Luxendarc. The writing was solid, the aesthetics appealing, the music wonderful, the gameplay razor sharp. It’s a damn fine game to pick up if you didn’t play it on the 3DS on its original release. Sure, it’s not going to put your new Switch 2 through its paces, but if you only buy new consoles because of graphics, I don’t know why you are reading my blog – I don’t give a shit about that kind of thing.
For evidence, this came in the mail while I was writing this review.
Bravely Default suffers from a significant amount of bloat in the last third of the game. The world map doesn’t change or expand. The dungeons are the same, with few new treasures to earn. There are no significant plot beats until the final chapter. The entire run of the last third is made up of repeated boss fights, and the only reward are small scenes showing the changes between each of the parallel worlds that the player is spirited to between chapters.
Now, the Chrono Cross fan in me is fine with this on the surface, but it feels like a slog over time. There are two full chapters of what I felt was fluff until I started to get invested again, and that’s because the game doesn’t get serious about the story it was telling in the first two acts again until chapter seven.
Of course, several days after rolling credits, I find myself getting just what the game did to me.
Going in on some mild-as-possible spoilers now, so run along if you don’t want that.
Space to hide the spoiler…also, nice map!
Airy, Agnes’ fairy companion, has been pressuring the party and the player alike throughout the game to stay on the journey, to revive the crystals, bringing them between the parallel worlds, one by one. It is revealed over the course of the last two chapters before the finale that Airy is hiding something from the party, a fact suggested through Ringabel’s flashbacks leading to this moment.
Much like the citizens of Luxendarc, the player and the party have been controlled by Airy, a being with immense power, and made to do her bidding through suggestion and manipulation.
Its a ludonarrative harmony that I’m probably going to appreciate more and more as time passes, the longer that the memory of repeating entire swathes of game blurs into the general white noise of any RPG’s random combat. The thought of that little monster floating around the menu screen, hurrying me along to the next crystal, is going to sit around in my brain instead of the rote repeats of the undead boss that I unloaded Curaga spells on three damned times.
As I sit here typing this, I find that the framing changes how I felt about the last act of the game, that my apathy was reflected by the characters in a way that I wasn’t gelling with in the moment. The game started to feel like work around the same time that the in game Party Chats were dwelling on just how many times they had revived the crystals.
The part of me that is warped by film school auteur theory wonders if this was the desired effect, that I am meant to take this reading away or if this is just the result me spending several days unpacking my conflicted feelings about the two sides of this game, the classic JRPG romp of the first half and the less exciting rehash of preexisting design elements in the second half. I don’t think I want to know the answer given Square Enix’s history of repackaging existing assets into new games. Nor does it actually matter, given that this was ultimately my experience with the journey.
On Marking Time
One of the only reasons I continue to write in my blog (despite a nonexistent readership) is that I can bumble through my own thoughts and feelings on something like a recently released game and just throw it into the sea without a second thought. I tend not to edit these posts since no one reads them, yes, and that’s only partially out of laziness, but I can go back and look for something that I previously wrote and see my thought process on the page, and rekindle things like my issues with Bravely Default.
I see it as a game that will grow more beloved in my memory with time, and stranger all the same. It’s a hard game for me to grapple with at the moment, and may stay that way. Let’s be clear, though – that’s a wonderful feeling. I am leaving this game thinking about it far more than I did Final Fantasy XVI, a game I was ultimately just unimpressed with after the credits rolled.
I look forward to talking to people about Bravely Default for a long time. I hope that Square Enix ports the 3DS sequel to the Switch 2 and puts it on the damned cartridge this time. I want to go back and finish the game I never finished on the first Switch and give more of my attention to this series.
My relationship with the Ultima series started with the retrospective videos from The Spoony Experiment. Thankfully, GOG was in the process of releasing versions of the games on their platform around this time, and I picked up everything I could as it came out. Unfortunately, enthusiasm didn’t translate into finished runs of these games. I played through Ultima I first, and later finished a run through Ultima VII: The Black Gate. I loved every second of those games, and still tell everyone I can to play through them.
I was quick to tell other RPG fans that they didn’t need to miss out on the series in any way, despite my limited exposure. I didn’t want to “skip ahead” in each of the three trilogies, so progress was halted by the obtuse nature of Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress, and my old laptop crashing about 1/3 into Ultima VII Part 2: Serpent Isle.
A little over three weeks ago, however, I finally finished Ultima II. Excitement for this particular adventure was renewed, and I was ready to play more. I was left wondering which I wanted to play. I wanted to get back to Serpent Isle because I had gotten so far only to lose progress to Windows. I even bought an NES copy of Exodus in hopes of playing through at least some version of the game since I don’t play much on my PC.
And then there’s Ultima IV.
Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, if you aren’t aware, is a free game on GOG. It’s been free as long as I’ve been playing games in the series. It was the first one I ever tried. It bounced me to the curb fast because I had no idea what I was doing – my first character started in Jhelom, which is entirely landlocked. I’d tried to play it numerous times, making different mistakes each time, even trying to rely on online help to make any kind of progress.
Regardless, it never worked out, so I would have to start fresh from time to time. Around ten years ago, I started what I had hoped would be the run that brought me to the end. I got a small notebook out from my writing supplies, and tried to play the game using only what would have originally came in the box – a map, a book of lore, a book of magic, a runic cipher.
The same Windows death that ruined my Serpent Isle run devoured that run of Ultima IV.
Needless to say, Ultima IV compelled me to come back far more than Exodus did on that night a few weeks ago. I grabbed a new notebook, printed a fresh map off from the downloads on GOG, got PDFs of the books loaded up on my tablet, and rolled a new character – this time a Tinker from Minoc.
I was determined to succeed in the Quest of the Avatar.
The Journey
For those uninitiated, Ultima IV is an open world RPG with turn based combat that takes place on a separate scene from the stages of exploration. Towns and castles dot the world, each housing a number of NPCs that the player has to talk to in text-adventure style keyword conversations. The player has to collect a series of items to succeed in their journey, explore a number of first person tile based dungeons.
But that description ignores what is most compelling about Ultima IV. The game is watching what you say, how you act, what you’re doing throughout, and is measuring your exhibition of the eight virtues: honesty, compassion, valor, justice, sacrifice, honor, spirituality, and humility.
On top of living the virtues in the world of Britannia, the player has to seek out eight runes, eight stones, seven companions, a three-part key, the wheel of a sunken ship, a book, a bell, a candle. There is meditation to be done at eight shrines. There are words of power to discover. There is an axiom to decode from visions offered by the shrines.
I don’t want to recount the specifics of the adventure here, though. There are excellent retrospectives and essays about the series that could do that just fine.
No. I want to talk about my journey throughout Britannia, and how I approached playing the forty year old game. I want to talk about my success. I want to talk my failures. And the things I ultimately had to look up to eventually bring my character to the depths of the Stygian Abyss.
A Veil Between Two Worlds
As previously mentioned, my intention was to play Ultima IV with no assistance from the internet. There was obviously some limit to how I could do this – I’d already seen videos about the game online, so I could only limit my exterior knowledge so much. Additionally, I had the experience of a few attempts under my belt. Regardless, I started my notes with a simple chart, knowing that I would need the mantras, the runes, a stone (which I thought was a gem at the outset, but no matter), and eventually to seek ascension in each of those virtues at the shrine.
From there, I started my journey out of Minoc, collecting the first pieces of my journey from there. I sought out a boat to simplify navigation. I captured every seemingly important detail in my notebook, and scribbled out the relative location of the various cities on my black-and-white map. Eventually I printed a second and translated the names on the map itself to give myself more information.
My avatar and his party died many times along the way.
But the experience of Ultima IV is not a cruel one. You respawn in Castle British, restocked with food and given 200 gold pieces. You are short a few items, but your key items remain – at least as far as I experienced. Check in with Hawkwind, and continue the journey.
Yes, my handwriting is awful.
There is a richness to the experience that I don’t find in modern RPGs. The quest journals automated by contemporary games are a blessing, sure, as nothing is forgotten if it is important. But I wrote my quest log, I wrote a guide to explore a world in the pages of my little journal.
In the ongoing drive for immersion in game design, I feel there’s still the possibility that the tangibility of things like printed maps and books of lore are viable in supplementing a gameplay experience. Where it does break the player from the controls, I don’t think that it removes the player from the experience. Those books exist for the player character. The game advises you to read the book of history before you determine your character class in the opening. The ankh the player character holds in their hand is the same as was included in the box back in 1985. That map is your map to the world of Britannia.
And, by extension, my hand written journal became my in-game journal, a document symbiotic with the texts included in the game.
As I pushed further in my journey, I developed a party of four, was blessed by the shrines, and made my way to the Stygian Abyss.
Those of you who have played Ultima IV already know what happened next from the last sentence.
The truth is, as dedicated as I was to navigating this experience through my own efforts, I wasn’t prepared to enter the Stygian Abyss. Certainly I had proven myself to be virtuous in the eyes of the game. Surely I was strong enough to face down whatever beasts awaited in the dungeon. I had the three part key. I had the wheel of the HMS Cape. I was prepared.
Still…I approached the chamber of the Codex, and was sent away. I was not prepared to enter and take the final test.
The Missing Pages
I took a break from Ultima IV in the days following my failure in the Abyss. I started playing the copy of Xenoblade Chronicles X that I’d been sitting on for a week while playing Ultima – I will have more to say about that game in the coming weeks. But, I eventually went back. I had to know what happened. I recovered my game, killing my entire party in the process. Turns out that the game got rid of my boat while I was down in the Abyss, and I hadn’t found mandrake root before going to the island, so I was stranded. No gate spell. No boat. Nothing.
So, I died, and respawned in Castle British, two hundred gold pieces to my name. I got a new boat and saved my game. Eventually, I would start poking around online to figure out how the game presents that you are prepared to go to the Abyss – I had believed that earning the eight stones and an entire ankh meant that you would be permitted access to the chamber of the Codex.
I didn’t find anything about specific indicators. Instead, I found the the answer – I didn’t recruit a full party.
Eight virtues. Eight runes. Eight mantras. Eight stones. Eight characters. Eight segments of the ankh earned at eight shrines.
Suddenly, I’d broken my plans to complete the game without online assistance beyond what I’d remembered from videos. Even those things I’d strived to find the clues to lead me through those quests myself – and I had, aside from the skull of Mondain. Which is a stupid story all itself that I will share shortly.
In the end, I would check on a couple of other small details. I never understood how to get information from the pubs regarding mandrake root, and never followed clues for nightshade at all…because I never came across leads for nightshade. Instead, I would find out that I wasn’t paying enough for rumors at the bar. At least, that’s how I understand it.
This is also how you are clued into where the white stone was left after it was taken from Hythloth, a dungeon beneath Castle British. When I found the back door in the castle and entered Hythloth, I found the hot air balloon, a most complicated device to use in Ultima IV. Riding around the world in the balloon, I just happened to see the ankh tile in the middle of the Serpent Spine mountains, and then wrangled my way to it with careful use of a single Wind Change spell – I reloaded my game more times than I can count.
Other than that, I managed to finish the game using my own notes. Sure, I am pretty disappointed that I didn’t pull it off entirely on my own, but I’m happy to have pulled it off regardless.
The notebook I collected my journey in can now be used in any play through I do from here forward, amended with the few details I didn’t maintain throughout the game – maybe I’ll even find the nightshade next time! I can even include that the skull of Mondain is in the area with the three splotches of fire. Early on, I thought that this was where the HMS Cape sunk, despite the clue listing that it was in the Cape of Heroes.
It would be two more days before I actually found the wreckage of the HMS Cape.
Of course, I didn’t know it was a wheel at first…
My second trip to the Abyss was almost as hard earned as the first. I had to collect enough supplies to safely make the trip, and bring four more party members up to a reasonable level so that they were at least somewhat combat viable. This constituted another weeks worth of play, spread out around long sessions with Xenoblade.
The Reward
Convincing anyone to play a 40 year old PC RPG is nearly impossible unless that person is already an enthusiast, and doing so with as little assistance as possible even more so. Playing any game that is nearly bereft of any modern conveniences is more than most want to put up with, even if it’s far simpler to save and reload than it could ever have been in 1985.
Ultima IV isn’t an impossible game to grasp, nor is it difficult in the usual sense in which we use the term to describe gameplay. It has specific rules that you will learn through play, and it subverts certain expectations that you might bring from playing nearly any other RPG made in the 45-plus years that the genre has lived. It’s more approachable than you probably expect.
So I challenge you here, friends – take up your pen and a pocket notebook of your choosing. Go get a copy of the map, printed if you can manage it. Download the books from GOG, and print those too if you feel compelled. Take the journey.
I promise you that you’ve never played anything else quite like it.
I will strive to keep nostalgia from coloring what I am about to write. After all, I am going to write about the only game in a series of four that I have played multiple times. Certainly, I have more hours in sequels to Diablo than I probably have in a single run of the 1997 original, possibly in all of my cumulative runs of the grisly little hack-n-slash. We’ll get to that, of course – I think that the run time of these games is part of the conversation I want to have, but it’s a lower-tier criticism I have to lay at the foot of the later Diablo titles. Additionally, I have to admit some hypocrisy on my part. And that’s where I really want to start.
I Bought and Have Been Playing Diablo 4
And that is why I’m a hypocrite. From day one, I said that I wasn’t going to give Activision Blizzard any money for something that seem designed to pull money away from the player. A ten dollar copy of Gamestop later, and I’ve made myself a liar. Curiosity got the better of me. I’m sorry.
I’m a few hours deep into the run, still exploring the first area in the game. The snowy expanses surrounding Kyovashad stretch infinitely around me to different questing areas, and I’ve slaughtered hundreds of foes on my climb to level twenty. It’s a Diablo game, for certain.
Though, it’s definitely a different beast than Diablo III, which I had a scattered opinion of. What strikes me strange about DIV is how far the frame of the experience has shifted from the first three games. There are extensive cut scenes, the player character is voice acted beyond short voice barks in the midst of gameplay. The game stops far more often to tell the story than in previous games. I’m not disinterested in the story about Lilith, so I’m not going to claim its to the game’s detriment. It’s just different, and that’s not a criticism I’m here to make.
The various little MMO features that spot the game, however, make the experience itch more than I like. While I haven’t felt the game hit me up for Activision Fun Bucks, the layers of hidden menus with various rewards, reminders of things I could get from a season pass, progress reminders, all ticking on screen at all times. I spent a few minutes at the end of my session last night looking over all of it, and just wondering if any of the moneymen who ask for these things think that legacy Diablo players want to waste their time with these things when the game is still stuffed with loot pinatas. Said loot pinatas now feel…predictable? I think that’s the word I want to use here.
My experience with Diablo IV isn’t long lived enough to write a review on the totality of the run, but it has had enough strange texture to have me reminiscing about the rest of the series. I’ve finished a run of each of the three games, done some post game stuff in DIII, and – as previously mentioned – taken multiple trips through Diablo I. To say that I was less than thrilled by changes made from Diablo II going to DIII would also be accurate, but those were more rooted in a disappointment over the general visual design of the game.
Like many people, I thought it looked too much like World of Warcraft, and not like the grisly grit of the first two games. It should also be noted that I’d never gotten past Act II of Diablo II at that time. My opinion of the art didn’t change, but I recognize that that’s not a salient critique of the game – the problems weren’t in the art design anyway.
Besides – after finally finishing Diablo II, I found that I still consider the first game my favorite of the series anyway. With that admission, I might have lost you, kind reader. And that’s okay – I’m not an online player, so my experience of the series is never going to align with the general audience. That’s fine.
A Church, a Catacomb, a Path to Hell
Diablo works quick – a cut scene about the evil that has befallen the world, and the player is dumped in Tristram only to be given their mission by a corpse outside of the church at the back of the small town. There are shops, sure, but you won’t have the money to buy anything meaningful for a while.
So on you go, into the church, and begin exploring. Every few floors, you’ll get a new shortcut back to Tristram, a new biome to click through. But the setting is window dressing for the one thing that stuck with the series as it progressed – clicking through hordes of the damned in order to collect money and loot. It’s a short, tight gameplay loop that dumps dopamine into the player’s brain.
I’m not here to argue the merits of building a game around collecting loot. I’m not going to sit here and make defenses that could be used to defend Borderlands as quickly as Diablo. I don’t think that Diablo succeeds entirely on the merit of its combat.
In fact, I would make the faintest argument that Diablo sits alone in the series for how the series left so much of the texture of the experience in the first game in lieu of developing further on the central gameplay loop.
Now, before I continue to make an ass of myself, I do want to note that these are not criticisms of the game design of DII-DIV. Instead, I am exploring the question that I’ve been sitting on while playing Diablo IV:
Why do I expect Diablo games to iterate on what I loved about Diablo when the series progressed off of the template of its immediate sequel instead?
So what is Diablo outside of its combat? Certainly, there is the grimy aesthetic, an illustration of what I’m sure my mom thought a Dungeons and Dragons session looked like when I was twelve, but that’s simplifying it far too much.
Diablo is direct. It’s blunt. It’s the instantaneous launch from the stepping into Tristram to wandering into the dungeon on a single directive. It’s the evolution of Gauntlet woven into the simplicity of the experience. It’s the source of the spice in the combat. It’s why the first three games waste no time getting the player entrenched in the slaughter. It’s the element that withered away the slowest across the four games. DIV spends far more time talking than any of the previous games, and DIII is overwritten in an entirely different way. DII is still more concise, but even that one spends more time on trying to build a narrative than Diablo did. Amongst others in the RPG genre, it’s fairly unique. By the time of its release, the genre was known for telling the biggest stories in games. Diablo was an RPG, but it’s heart is arcade. It’s a studded war hammer hanging in a gallery of ornate rapiers and golden bastard swords.
But an RPG it was. And probably the only game in the series that seriously adhered to those traditions.
And there goes another wave of people who are opting out of my opining on a thirty year old game. Fair enough.
Upon leveling up in Diablo I, the player is given a few points to drop into their stats. That’s it. Everything else is either tied to class, or learned from the spell books discovered in the labyrinth. Or purchased in the stores. The gold accrued from the grind could be given to the witch in town to get spells. And all three classes could learn the bulk of the spells in the game, so you could support your sword swinging with a bit of extra fire. Or more importantly, replace buying town portal scrolls with a book to learn the spell.
There’s a lot of agency given to the player in how they prepare to face off against the Lord of Terror. The player has to sculpt their avatar in game entirely against what they find or purchase in the game. As a result, there’s a texture to the experience that isn’t present in any of the three sequels. You are in control of what your character can do, and you can not respec at the eleventh hour. This also means that it’s hard to completely break a run. I’ve never had a failed run at Diablo because there’s always a path forward.
Diablo II, on the other hand, decided that I wasn’t allowed to defeat the final boss of the expansion because I didn’t follow a specific series of instructions on how to setup my druid. Again, I’m a solo player, so there wasn’t much I could do but respec. It still feels bad years later. Diablo III went down incredibly smooth. DIV seems to be taking the same cues, providing a skill tree to develop inside of a menu instead of stat upgrades and the hunting of spell books.
As a result, the ongoing string of player choices made in reaction to the trip down to hell leaves me feeling that Diablo was the only game to really sell the role playing part of being an RPG. Such a thing isn’t entirely tied up in attaching better numbers to a character.
It’s an appealing combination, one as old as the role playing video game itself. The player is the hero, facing impossible odds. They explore, fight, improve, and understand every step on the path to power and success. It’s tangible in every step of the journey.
But then it ends with a massive, glowing stone right to the head.
The Lord of Terror Goes North
Before I wax pretentious about the end of Diablo, I think it’s important to note that the game ends. No post game is waiting for players who venture into the heart of hell itself to defeat the Lord of Terror. It’s a concise game. I honestly think that is why it’s so easy to go back and take the ride again – which is not something I can say about the sequels, which only get longer and longer with each new installment, complete with expansive post game dungeon crawls.
The final cut scene of Diablo sees the player character slam the Soulstone into their head. It is revealed in Diablo II that they have been possessed by the Lord of Terror, and a new journey begins to truly defeat this evil once and for all. This time, the Soulstone is also destroyed.
Which, theoretically, means that theentity known as Diablo should be defeated, and any sequels shouldn’t follow the narrative conceits of the first two games. Unfortunately, video games are a multi-billion dollar business, and brand familiarity will win every damned time.
Without wasting time on details, I’ll simply say that the story in Diablo III left me cold with its fan service derivations on the first two games framed in an epic narrative that was about as fulfilling as a Little Debbie cake. Certainly I enjoyed playing the game, but nothing really sticks in my mind about that experience beyond the flat enjoyment of it. As I said earlier, it went down entirely smooth, and since I didn’t care about the story, there wasn’t anything else to latch onto.
Diablo III only draws on the reputation of Diablo II for the short loop of fight-loot-sell-fight again gameplay, and relies on the library of lore to sell the rest of the experience. A variety of class specific skills means that the directness of the combat requires more dexterous inputs than in the previous games, at least as far as my experience of them is concerned (note, I have never been good at video games). Or perhaps just more inputs than the click-click-click-click-click-click of the earliest titles.
More noticeably, the world expands further with each game. It’s natural that sequels seek to have a wider scope than their predecessors. I just lament what is lost with the expansion.
In a sense, I am disappointed that there are – in the sense of what I most enjoyed from Diablo – no sequels to the original game after Diablo II. No games are iterating on the original, that focused journey through a specific setting and series of challenges. It’s not a problem for the series – it has only become more commercially successful over time. Aside from the disgusting efforts to monetize the series, it hasn’t effectively detracted from the overall experience either. Modern Diablo is still very much a fun game to play.
I’m just not getting that specific flavor back. And I can’t even suggest that I should have ever expected a studio to do such a thing. Sequels have to iterate and expand or they are criticized for never stepping away from the origin of the series – see the first five Tomb Raider games and their decline in critical and commercial notoriety. The massive leap in scope from the first Diablo to the second cemented the series place in the history of the video games in multiple contexts. Diablo II is still a game people play, having also been remastered in 2021, complete with the first ever console ports of the game. Blizzard has left Diablo I as a seasonal even in DIII. I don’t know that it will ever be rereleased outside of the release on GOG…which I really need to play since it has Hellfire included, and I’ve never played Hellfire!
Maybe that’s what I should do instead of pontificating on what might have been, as I am so frequently inclined to do. If anything, I hope I have sparked some curiosity for the oft forgotten original game in a series I enjoy. If you want to spice up your revisit, maybe even check out the PS1 port of the original – it’s honestly great.
Time does strange things to games, especially popular ones. We’re honestly lucky that Diablo, as compromised as it is by publisher demands, gets to be as true to itself as it really is. I may have issues with Diablo IV, but it’s still a Diablo game…even if it’s more Diablo II than Diablo I.
First up, I don’t often write about music on this blog. I honestly find it difficult to write about music in any way that feels authoritative. I can tell you what I like, why it makes no damned sense, and discuss why my standards are stratospheric compared to…well, let’s just call ’em normal people. I loathe the music of Taylor Swift. I think that Andy Tillison is a genius. Steve Vai is among my favorite guitarists partially because of how his excess shines through. I think Blixa Bargeld is similarly gifted while approaching the instrument from the opposite end of the creative spectrum from Vai. I like noise and drone. I like electronic music. I have the early Garth Brooks albums on vinyl – nostalgia is a hell of a drug. I collect video game soundtracks to the point that I’m annoyed about how hard it is to find a reasonably priced authentic copy of the Final Fantasy IV: Celtic Moon album .
My taste in music is nonsense. And then I’m an ardent prog rock fan.
I get excited for hour long songs, impenetrable lyrics that poke at psuedo-philosophical concepts and wade through the cliffs notes of thousand page novels in twenty minutes – Yes were so good in the 70s. I seek out bands when the word “pretentious” is plastered upon them. I’ve been this way for over twenty years, starting with my obsession with Rush and Pink Floyd. When I got into Dream Theater because of a scrap of guitar tab given to me by a friend at school, I was too far gone to be saved.
I became a music snob. Still am. It exhibits itself in weird ways all the time, but I am a colossal music snob, impossible to please, whose needs from the art are ever shifting.
My favorite 2024 album – a literary rap masterpiece by Moor Mother.
This is all to establish a foundation for what I am about to write. There is no chance that I’ll be able to give you a clear rationale behind what I’m about to say, but after listening to the third lead track from the upcoming Dream Theater album, Parasomnia, I wanted to put the thoughts to page.
Black Clouds and Silver Linings
With hindsight, the title of Dream Theater’s tenth studio album reads prophetic to my experience with the band. I was in college in 2009, and had spent a couple of years working in a record store. My listening had broadened some, but not as much as it would over the next decade. Dream Theater had been replaced by Steven Wilson and Porcupine Tree in my personal top five, and each new album since I’d become a fan was increasingly disappointing. I started listening to the band in 2003, right before they released Train of Thought. I never clicked with most of that album, but then Octavarium was on the way! Maybe it would be better. Twenty years later, the only thing I really like on the album is the title track, and even that is limited to the music. Systematic Chaos came across weak, a feeling I felt more after watching the included documentary with the special edition of the album.
But it was Black Clouds & Silver Linings that tossed me to the curb. I didn’t have a job for most of 2009, so for the first time since Octavarium, I wasn’t going out and buying a copy around release. My best friend bought it. We listened to it that afternoon while we sat around our apartment.
At least the cover of Larks Tongues in Aspic Pt. 2 is good.
I hated it. I thought it was one of the most tepid, meandering, meaningless records I’d ever heard. It came out the same year as Porcupine Tree’s The Incident, which was far more energetic, electrifying, and bold than the new Dream Theater.
This isn’t to say that the band wasn’t performing at their peak – that is never the case. Every member of Dream Theater is a masterclass musician. And James Labrie is a fine vocalist – an opinion I still hold counter to so many Dream Theater fans that will never understand that he’s not leaving the band until that band ends.
Black Clouds had all of the hallmarks of what I thought made Systematic Chaos a middling DT album – Mike Portnoy sings too much, the focus on “being heavy” meant boring rhythm parts, some of the lyrics were ridiculous to the point of absurdity. And let me be clear, I like some of their most abstract fantasy bullshit lyrics more than their actual best songs. Give me a Surrounded just as much as you give me a Space Dye Vest any day. But Forsaken is literally about a vampire.
Last year, I picked up a copy of the three disc version of BC&SL, mostly to listen to the bonus disc where they recorded a bunch of solid covers of Queen and King Crimson. Time didn’t give me a fresh appreciation for the album. I have listened to it several times, and I still just…don’t like it. None of it sticks with me. It sounds like Dream Theater on auto-pilot.
So Dream Theater slipped further away from my interests. And Mike Portnoy left the band.
The Mangini Era
I skipped A Dramatic Turn of Events despite watching the documentary about searching for a new drummer. I still wonder what kind of band they would have been if Virgil Donati had been in the lineup given how much he put his own spin on the songs they auditioned him with. As the fans know now, though, Mike Mangini joined the band and went on to record five studio albums with the band before Portnoy rejoined in 2023. I remember listening to the lead track from Mangini’s first turn with the band, On the Backs of Angels, and thinking it was alright, but I never sought the album out. As time goes on, I still think about picking it up if I see it in a record shop.
Oh, what could have been…
However, it was their self titled 2013 album that got me to give them another go. For the first time in a decade, Dream Theater sounded like a band with motivation and drive. They still sounded the same, signature Dream Theater unmoving since 1999. It was a killer record though, and one that got my attention back onto the band. It came at a weird time though, because at the time I’d been deeply into the work of Sunn. Monoliths and Dimensions kept my ears shaking during every writing session from 2012 to 2014.
I picked up the next two DT albums when they dropped, The Astonishing and Distance Over Time. I am the seemingly rare Astonishing fan. It’s an overcooked concept album derived from so many contemporary trends in fantasy that relies entirely on the strength of James Labrie’s ability to deliver the voice of the numerous characters in the album. It’s honestly a cheesy mess. It’s everything I wanted from it. I honestly think it’s one of the most compelling things they’ve done since the nineties simply because it steps far enough away from the core of their sound to be captivating. It’s too long. It’s ridiculously plot heavy. But it’s a big prog metal passion project, and there’s a lot of love in that record. John Petrucci wrote some of the best music he’s ever written on that album, and I don’t give a damn that everyone disagrees with me. I’m used to it. I also think that The Rainbow Children is an unsung masterpiece in Prince’s catalog.
Sadly, they didn’t make a stop near me for this tour.
As Dream Theater continued on, Mike Portnoy was floating between numerous super groups after his break from Avenged Sevenfold. The Winery Dogs, Adrenaline Mob, Sons of Apollo…and two more that I never heard about until I went to Wikipedia to fill out this section…
It deserves mentioning that Mike Portnoy has always been a force in the prog rock scene. The list of projects he’s been involved with is staggering, comparable to…what…Jan Axel von Blomberg? He may even have Hellhammer outdone. I have no disrespect for Portnoy as a musician. I recently sat at my desk and listened to the first OSI album three times in a row simply because it’s a stellar progressive metal album, rife with incredible musicianship and stellar songwriting. He’s great on that album, much like he was great on so many of the albums around that time.
A hype sticker worth your hype – Jim Matheos, Kevin Moore, Steven Wilson AND SEAN MALONE!
But none of his post-A7X bands were interesting. I never heard anything from those albums that clicked. It all felt safe. It didn’t matter how many world class musicians joined Mike Portnoy for a new band, I never got through an entire record from those bands. I tried. I did. I would give each of those bands a song or two and just fall back off.
It seems simple from a distance – I just don’t enjoy Mike Portnoy as a creative entity anymore.
Again, this isn’t disrespect. He seems like a great guy, and he’s a stellar percussionist. But he’s not been one of my favorites for a long time, long since replaced by Gavin Harrison. Whatever shifted in his priorities as a songwriter and contributor as a band happened in the mid-aughts, and he’s been on that path ever since. I didn’t enjoy his push to sing more and more on each subsequent Dream Theater album at the time.
And that’s why I was anxious about his rejoining Dream Theater in 2023. I hadn’t listened to the last album they recorded with Mangini yet – I think this was around the time that I was listening to cast albums from Broadway musicals and dark wave pop. Songs from their new album were popping up in late 2024. It was time to see what Dream Theater would be next.
When Portnoy and Petrucci Reunite
I am finally listening to A View From the Top of the World as I write this meandering mess of a blog – as if I write anything else in my blog. It’s great. It’s a culmination of so much of what made the Mangini era of Dream Theater so right for me, minus The Astonishing since they probably don’t want to risk upsetting their fans by doing anything like it again. Mangini drops blast beats in the 20 minute title track. The ebbs and flows in that title track are so stunning that I can’t wait to listen to this record again over the next few weeks. The lead track The Alien, is packed with interesting rhythm parts. I definitely need more spins to get this one fully into my head, but I’m honestly going to miss this era of Dream Theater. I have to assume that it’s because I prefer John Petrucci’s songwriting in the band to Portnoy’s, and they are, historically speaking only, the Paul McCartney and John Lennon of the band. Respectfully. Because neither of them are as good as John Myung, who is George Harrison in this analogy.
Petrucci’s solos in the absence of Portnoy have more lyricism and melody than the shred-heavy guitar exercises of BC&SL or Systematic Chaos. He’s a more interesting musician without Portnoy, to my ear.
If we get confirmation that this was AI generated, I’ll have another reason to hate it!
I have to say this because I did listen to Night Terror the day it went online. And I hated it. I hated it the same way I hated that first listen of Black Clouds & Silver Linings. It was tedious, grunting metal guitar, devoid of everything that I felt came back during the Mangini era. Viper King ripped so damned hard, and now we’re just getting stock metal riffs filtered through Petrucci’s speed, complete with scale practices in lieu of a proper guitar solo.
Two more songs have come out since that one. It doesn’t sound like we’re going to get anything like Barstool Warrior or The Looking Glass this time. It’s the same kind of metal that they pursued on Train of Thought, and it’s just dull. Midnight Messiah drops lyrical references to two older Dream Theater songs, and cannibalizing your own legacy isn’t promising.
I have tickets to see them on their 40th anniversary tour. I’m obviously excited to see them live again, this being the first time I’ve seen them since the Images and Words and Beyond tour. I’ll get to see Portnoy perform with them this time. Maybe the new songs play better live? Because I’m now listening to Night Terror again, just thinking about how much it feels like they’re repackaging their previous heavy songs.
The disappointing fact at the heart of this is that this is the band that wrote Awake, which for me is a holy text for progressive metal in the same way that Images and Words is. While I&W features the melodious side of Dream Theater over the heavy side, Awake went heavy, and maintained all of the characteristics of what makes Dream Theater such a great band. Voices, Lie, The Mirror,Scarred are all still among my favorite songs from the band.
Maybe they’ll pull out another great record after Parasomnia. Obviously, I’m still watching to see what they do.
Apotheosis in Lunar Gold released late in September following a ten day game jam that I went into solo based on an idea that I had while working on Stripe Breaks Out. I haven’t written about it because following the jam, I wanted to make some improvements on it, or at least try to address some of the comments made by the wonderful community that took part in GB Jam 12 this year.
This was another series of firsts – it was my first game jam, my first horror game. It was far more experimental than my first game as well. Unfortunately, it was still extremely short.
But that’s okay. I made it in ten days, and it’s what I originally envisioned when I had the idea back in late August.
I don’t want to say too much on this one. I set out to make something obscure, and I think that I accomplished that. I would love to get some feedback from players, though. I guess we will see.
The next game I make will not be limited by the restrictions of the Game Boy, as much as I’ve enjoyed that. Well…one of them might be.
I have wanted to make video games for a long time – probably twenty-four years now. It started after I read an article in Electronic Gaming Monthly about jobs in the video game industry. The article gave shape to the vague concept of the work behind making games, behind writing about games, etc. It was interesting enough that I immediately wanted to do something.
This isn’t the only time this has ever happened to me, of course. The list of creative works I’ve attempted far exceeds the ones I’ve ever finished. I started conceiving video game ideas right out the gate after reading that article, certain that it was possible if I just planned it, it could be done. This was, of course, foolish. I was an idiot with a notebook, same as I have always been. My creative ambitions have always warped around whatever my interests are. I was writing my first stories at that time as well, and eventually got into making music. If you are here, you know which of these creative outlets have sprouted the most fruit.
Anyway, it’s 2024 now. I’ve tried several middleware engines out with the idea of making something over the last twenty years. I even downloaded GB Studio on two previous occasions. Game Maker Studio, Unity, Godot, Unreal, whatever the PlayStation Vita dev environment was called…the itch has always been there, but it was GB Studio that gave me a space that I could make sense of and start building in. I made a bit of progress on a project back in June that actually formed into a something I could open and move a character around in. It wasn’t particularly pretty, but it was on the way to being a functional prototype of something complex and interesting.
I’ll get back to you someday…
In other words, it was easily too complicated for my skillset at the time. It’s probably still out of my reach after everything I’ve done in the last five months.
And on the Saturday before Father’s Day, something happened.
I took my daughter out that morning. We went to breakfast before going to see Inside Out 2 at the theater. We were talking, joking, having a great time, and I asked her what I thought was going to be a hypothetical question.
“If I were to make a game for you, what kind of game would you want it to be?”
She would go on to talk to me about this for the next two weeks. And with that, development began.
No, I Didn’t Expect Her to Make a Design Document
Stripe Breaks Out is, like any video game that has ever been produced, a compromise. My daughter wanted a game where she could play as a cat and save other cats. She wanted a game with keys and bugs. She wanted a game that didn’t have boss fights. She wanted a game where the cat could get its hair done, similar to a Barbie themed game she sometimes plays on the Switch. She wanted something easy that she couldn’t lose at. None of the animals could be killed or hurt. Finally, it had to have exactly ten levels. As I started figuring this out, she still wasn’t reading fluidly (she’s getting better every day) so it couldn’t be heavy on narrative.
After talking about the idea with her further, we came to the agreement that it would be a platformer with some adventure game elements, like item swapping and overworld exploration. The prototype I was working on before slid into the rearview the more she asked me about it. Stripe Breaks Out became my key project over the summer.
My daughter gave me a drawing of the “levels” she had in mind. And I pulled from it what I could to put into the finished game. A spider in the tutorial level is pulled entirely from the drawing she gave me – a friendly spider, per her request.
It’s a bit more sinister in 8-bit.
She loved the prototype stages I put together, happy to see the little bits and pieces she talked about on the screen. She wanted the whole game all at once. That was in early July. I suggested that the player character should be based on her favorite plush, Stripe, a little grey and white cat she’s loved on hard for the last few years.
I’m writing this in the first week of September, before the release of the game online. She’s still persistently asking when the game will be completely finished, asking if she can test the game out, etc. Her excitement has driven my desire to finish the game, motivated me to stick with the project every step of the way.
But, as you could easily assume, making video games is difficult.
A Game Without Failure
Video games can be any number of things. However, given the limitations of the scope of Stripe Breaks Out, I didn’t allow myself many options. Narrative had to be limited, and the game had to be built entirely out of platforming skill checks and maze like level design. I had to make something easy throughout.
I don’t think I’m qualified to comment on the challenges of designing video games beyond the simple fact that it’s extremely hard to make games. I’m not going to posit that I’ve made something great. I shot for “good” when working on this project, and I hope I’ve reached that.
Thank God for the Sprite Swap plugin…
Development proceeded based on the ideas I put together in the prototype. I made new art assets almost every time I sat down to work on the game, from household objects, cats, new enemy sprites, more cats, and obsessing over the shape of trees (they’re fine?). The last three months have been an ongoing reminder that I am not an artist. Pixel art can be gorgeous. Mine is functional enough.
I think.
My adorable little producer likes it, and she’s the only critic I will answer to.
House levels started out with a goal of verisimilitude and breakable vases to acquire the flower collectibles described in the drawing I was given. Limitations in GB Studio collided with my programing ineptitudes as I realized that twenty actors went fast when adding enemies, switches, and collectibles.
A wiser me would have taken this moment to cut my stages into smaller pieces, akin to how games I played this year work. Something like Tiny Toon Adventures 2: Montana’s Movie Madness divides each larger level into individual stages with only a transitional break at the end of each segment. That’s what I should have done to the whole game.
The hardest lesson to learn continues to be sprite limits. Yes, I’m still learning.
Instead, I just made each house level its own series of progressively complicated challenges, introducing four keys that had to be collected by the end of the game to drive light exploration. It was a solution, but probably not the only one I should have strived for. Again, more spacious levels would have been more interesting and given the game a bit more length than it ended up having.
But, time was a pressing factor, and we all wanted to play a finished game.
I did eventually try larger stages spread across multiple scenes, and I want to believe that it made for a more interesting game in the second half than in the first. Time will tell of course.
The introduction of the keys as progression items had me include our housecats as characters in the game. The goal became not just to save some cats, but our cats – Jones, Dax, Hux, and Pumpkin.
The inclusion of dogs as foes came about as a result of the larger stages and need for new challenges. The idea was to have the dogs charge after Stripe once the player entered their range. Scripting this was far more complicated than I expected. This was the first time I went to the GB Studio reddit for help. The script that I assembled for this, even with their help, caused the game to chug. But I put up with it at the time. It was passible enough for that point in development.
This roadblock probably contributed to the fact that there are only two enemy types in the entire game. An oversight, perhaps, but also something that should have hit me a lot sooner. Given that this is the first game I’ve ever made, I’ll allow myself some grace.
I’m glossing over a lot of the process simply because it’s not interesting to outline the step-by-step grind of making pieces of a platformer and testing them to make sure the jumps are possible, that the game can be read well, etc.
I did fix this!
The best night in the project came in late July. My daughter has a tendency to delay her bedtime as much as she can each night. The latest method she’d picked up was that when she jumps in bed she will ask to play Rock Paper Scissors ten times. After two weeks of doing this, I decided to bake it into her game. I spent an entire session making a Rock Paper Scissors minigame from scratch, drawing cat paws, and scripting the minigame. I haven’t had to make any changes to that portion of the game after adding it. I’m still thrilled that it even came together. Look for Rock Paper Claw early in the game and in the forest before the end of the game.
Yes, this was hard to accomplish.
As the level design became more complicated, I kept adding concepts that were outside of the scope of the GB Studio engine. It was when I added switches and gates to the game that I discovered how limited the collision states were in the basic program. I added the Platformer Plus plugin at this time, solving some issues and creating entirely new ones from my personal ineptitudes as a programmer.
Leaving the house stages of the game was freeing…even though I started making jail stages.
July ended, and August saw me reaching the last stages of building the game. I finished writing the soundtrack and added it in throughout the game. I’m pretty happy with the score for the game. I get a few of the pieces stuck in my head on occasion. It was around this time that I also switched the game to being a GBC only game. The slowdown in several stages of the game was just too intense to deal with, so I let the extra processing speed of the GBC cover the fact that I wrote poor script.
Glitch fixes started entering my to-do lists. Gremlins persisted even up to the last two days as I added in i-frames to damage states and completely broke the game. Nothing has broken my motivation quite as effectively as hitting serious glitches like what happened with the switch gates and adding i-frames.
However, thanks to the help of people in the GB Studio reddit and discord, my friends who have watched the progress of my work, played builds, etc…it’s done.
And Now For the Part Where You Get to Play
If you’re reading this, the game is out and available to download or play over on Itch. The soundtrack has been up over on bandcamp for a couple of weeks. I wrote this to give context to the experience, to put a pin in everything that I’ve spent the last few months chipping away on. Thank you to everyone who has encouraged me as I’ve worked on this thing. Thank you Jo for putting up with me as I’ve worked on it, listened to me ramble about scripting problems or the clips of music that I’ve bounced around to like an idiot. You are an amazing wife.
And to my daughter, should you ever read this…thank you for being you, for being the best kid I could have ever asked for, and thank you for asking for this game for four months straight. I hope you enjoyed it.
I spent a two nights this week playing through the frequently maligned N64 RPG Quest 64, using my Polymega. I put around eleven hours into the experience, rolled credits, and came to think that…yeah, critics are right about this one.
There is a good game in Quest 64. The writing doesn’t help, delivering a basic “collect the treasures of the elements” plot. The idea of an island inspired by Ireland is pretty interesting, but the art direction doesn’t deliver on this promise. The visuals are the most Nintendo 64 visuals you could imagine: flat polygonal buildings and sectored off areas with massive skyboxes, pointy characters, checkerboard textures – you get the idea. The ideas behind the magic system are pretty interesting, though the frequency of combat and lack of meaningful exploration across the journey means that the experience wears out its welcome around the same time you unlock the magic barrier spell. Giving the player a cheap invincibility spell was a poor decision.
So, I played a bad game from almost thirty years ago. That’s nothing new. I frequently play old games, good and bad. We don’t talk about how many copies of Sewer Shark I’ve had in my possession over the years through the general course of buying Sega CD games, and my love for the Rebel Assault games should be considered a black mark against me as a critic.
As a collector and a player of games both new and old, I try to engage with everything I play from the view that a game can be good if I try to meet it where it is. I don’t want to believe that anyone sets out to make an explicitly bad game – that goes contrary to the believe that games are an artform. At some point, there had to have been a kernel of intent and interest that led to the creation of any art. Such is the case with Quest 64. It’s one of the two reasons why I played the game.
The other is that my best friend gave it to me and said I had to play it because it was in my collection. Cruel bastard.
But Quest 64 isn’t terrible. It’s just boring. It functions well enough, the camera doesn’t cause too much irritation – something to be proud of for an N64 game. I could consider many ways that it might have been an amazing game. I could learn something that I could put into a game of my own someday if I ever managed to learn how to do that.
You can take something from all art, good or ill. Countless artists who are more talented and prolific than myself teach that anyone who wants to create should engage with more than just the best of their medium of choice, outside of their medium of choice. A game like Arzette doesn’t happen as a result of only good games. It is inspired by two games that have been the punching bag of Zelda fans for decades.
So I played Quest 64 and tried to have a good time. I did for a while. And then I wanted it to end for the last two hours. And that’s okay.
I have a few hours in Forspoken. I would like to pick up Wanted: Dead. I want to play Racing Lagoon for PS1 now that there is an English translation. For anyone legitimately interested in this medium, its history, its future, it’s important to find the good in the bad. It’s important to play games that have awkward controls from the early days of 3D. It’s vital to the future of the medium to have an appreciation for the missteps as well as the masterpieces.
Go play a bad game, and have a great time doing it.
What follows will occasionally ride off the rails. It’s why I’ve started writing it about eight times over the last three years, and why I’ve not written it before now.
Anyone who has ready my blog or social media feeds knows that I speak out against remakes of video games. Movies too, but we’re going to stick to games here, because the problems I’m going to be talking about are unique to video games. This seems like the right time to tackle this subject, with the follow up to That Game I Didn’t Like coming out this month, and renewed begging from a certain corner of the Final Fantasy fandom asking for a remake of Final Fantasy VIII. Rather than blocking another dozen Twitter users for their opinions, it’s time to just…put it all on the page so I can point to this wall of text in the future so people can continue to ignore me.
But the fact remains that this is a sensitive topic to me for a number of reasons. I do see video games as an art form. I think that it’s an interesting medium for narrative, both in terms of literal storytelling and ludonarrative alike. This means that original texts are going to be far more compelling to me than a revised text. The meaning can get lost in constant translation – something that anyone who has played Working Designs release can attest to.
This isn’t to suggest that remakes are universally bad. Some remakes are genuinely inspired works, such as Resident Evil. The Gamecube reimagining of the original 1996 game has been ported to modern consoles continuously for a reason.
But what about the original?
Replacement and Erasure
Resident Evil released in the US in March of 1996 on the PlayStation and Sega Saturn. The original long box release is a gem amongst collectors for a variety of reasons, the most obvious being the ridiculous art work on the tall CD box. But as I learned from a fantastic video by Stop Skeletons From Fighting, there’s more to the original version of the game than the box, or even the original soundtrack.
In the process of localization, Capcom introduced numerous changes to the original release of Resident Evil, all of which made the game harder. This measure was taken to pull players away from renting the game and finishing it in a weekend, a fact that’s hilarious given the sheer volume of people who have finished the game only using the knife. Ink ribbons came in smaller allotments. Auto aim was removed. Following the jewel case printings of the original game, the game would go through its first modification in the form of Resident Evil: Director’s Cut. Most of the changes would be considered to be for the better, since the game now had multiple difficulty levels and aim assist. Unfortunately, it would not be the last time that the game would get modified. The Greatest Hits release of Resident Evil: Director’s Cut would see the original score abandoned and replaced with one that is…let’s be charitable and call it experimental.
By 1998, there were three versions of Resident Evil. Sure, this is somewhat typical of Capcom given how their fighting games get numerous revisions. I would argue that this is different though. For one, I can play pretty much any version of Street Fighter II on my Switch right now using one of two different cartridges. I can not do the same with Resident Evil.
The 2002 remake only compounds this problem. A further revision on the Nintendo DS is yet another wrench in the works.
If you can hear terrible MIDI trumpets right now, I am sorry.
In 2024, you have two legal options to play Resident Evil on modern hardware. You can play a remastered version of the 2002 remake, or you can play Resident Evil: Director’s Cut Dual Shock Version through a PlayStation Plus subscription. There is no legal avenue to play with the original soundtrack, or to tackle the unique difficulty of the original release. Admittedly, this isn’t a worst case situation. But it does reflect how a remake or revision can push an original version out of the view of players.
Far worse is Silent Hill 2.
The original Silent Hill 2 was released on the PlayStation 2 in 2001, less than a year after the console launched. As recently discussed on this blog, it remains a revered classic. Months later, an expanded version would release on the original Xbox, akin to the Substance version of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. These versions eventually made their way back to the PlayStation 2. A poorly developed remaster of Silent Hill 2 released on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in 2012. There are also PC ports of the original, but…
There are no legal avenues to place the original version of Silent Hill 2 on modern hardware. Instead a remake is in the works from Bloober Team. If you’ll allow me to editorialize a bit: it looks completely terrible.
With the release of the remake, newcomers to the series will only have the newest version of the game to take into account. This is the case for games like Resident Evil 2, any number of classic Final Fantasy games, and dozens upon dozens of others. The only avenue to play original texts is often emulation or the purchase of expensive original pressings.
Preservation in a Time of Erasure
According to the Video Game History Foundation, 87% of video games are no longer available. I’d have to do a bit more digging to find out, but I do wonder if examples such as the ones I’ve listed above are included in this.
As more and more games are delisted from digital platforms, and the concept of ownership is further and further pushed into the trash, access to legacy titles is slipping through our fingers. Certainly, if you have the money, you could indulge in the hobby of retro game collecting, but that bubble never seems to burst. This leaves piracy, but not everyone is comfortable with the concept, or wants to learn the ropes associated with emulators and such. But this isn’t a problem for a number of younger players, who were raised on live service attractions first and foremost. That’s the market of the future, and the one that major publishers want to attract.
I’ve acquired so many sets like this on Switch for a reason…
The death of preservation, the erasure of classic games, is nothing but good for those who hold the money at the top of the industry. An industry that generated 347 billion dollars in 2023 has little interest in the past – it isn’t worth as much money as a digital t-shirt in Fortnite. It is a net negative for the potential of video games as an artform, however, to attribute success of the medium to the amount of money it has generated in revenue when most of that money comes from predatory microtransactions, not to mention the quality of life for the people who created everything that generated that money.
The ongoing push for remakes from an incredibly vocal public suggests that while the interest in classic games is there, there isn’t enough interest in playing the original texts. Certainly, you could go play Final Fantasy VIII Remastered on any modern platform, but this hasn’t stopped a number of people from taking to social media to demand a remake in the vein of Final Fantasy VII Remake.
Remakes Are Ultimately Uninteresting
For the sake of consistency, I will reuse one of my previous examples.
I know what Silent Hill 2 was about. I know what happened, I know how it played, I know what I saw and experienced. I know what the Red Pyramid Thing is and what it represents. Silent Hill 2, as a text, is a brilliant work of art that utilizes the medium beautifully.
This game is going to be bad!
The remake can not repeat the successes of the original text by the simple merit of the original text already existing. I have played the original, and there are no surprises to be had from playing a remake. The changes depicted in the existing trailers point to a game that seems to be alien to the experience I had while having no ideas of its own. The promise of a Red Pyramid Thing origin story isn’t appealing. As Patton Oswalt so perfectly put it, I don’t give a shit where the stuff I love comes from.
I’ve been following video games for 24 years at this point, and have played hundreds of titles. This includes a number of remakes, revisions, etc. It’s almost impossible to avoid, largely due to the way that video games were developed and ported and released over the first twenty years after the NES revived the industry. Good remakes, such as Ys Memories of Celceta, only cause me to have interest in the original texts. This entry in the Ys series is not a remake, but the canonical telling of Ys IV, as the original games Dawn of Ys and Mask of the Sun were outsourced to HudsonSoft and Tonkin House respectively rather than developed in house by Falcom. Celceta references both of these games. And, given that I quite liked Memories of Celta, I want to know more. I want to play these games.
Also, that 90’s anime box art. Yes.
Which means that I have to play original versions, emulated, patched for translation. And…I will. I have a Polymega now. I will be buying these games off of eBay and playing them using fan translations to experience the original texts.
But that’s not ideal at all. It’s not something that everyone will do, not something that many will be willing to do. It’s the kind of thing that obsessive enthusiasts and historians do, and I’m definitely of the former category. While I’m okay that Falcom has created their canonized Ys IV, I lament the fact that the originals are doomed to obscurity, much like the okay-at-best Ys III: Wanderers From Ys.
To press it further, I feel like there isn’t enough consideration for the practical costs of a full remake of an a idea. The cost of video game development is extraordinary at this point, and games like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth aren’t cheap to produce or promote. Asking for more of those means that the money goes to remakes, not new ideas. I may have thought thatFinal Fantasy XVI was mediocre, but I’ll gladly accept that over the ongoing rehash of VII. The original text should be maintained and rereleased on modern platforms, but I don’t expect a studio to pour tens of millions of dollars into “updating” a game when that original game is perfectly fine as it is. Even bad games deserve to be maintained in such a way. We have plenty that we can learn from bad games.
Revisionist History
Before I wrap this up, I want to address one of the common talking points I see in online discourse regarding remakes. This is the idea that a remake allows a game to “live up to the original vision” or something along those lines.
It’s still an incredibly captivating experience because the writing is superb.
I could spin an entire thread about how this ultimately gets us things like the Star Wars Special Edition trilogy, but I’ll keep this simple: A finished text needs to stand up to scrutiny. I’ll gladly point players to Xenogears as an example of one of the most fascinating JRPGs, an ambitious and incredible game that still isn’t celebrated as much as it should be because of a flawed second half. And as much as I’d like to step into the parallel universe where Xenogears was finished to its original spec, I can’t. I have to play the version we have. Thankfully, it’s very good, and worthy of study and dissection. See the incredible video from KBash that released in 2023 for one such discussion.
It may be true that Kazushige Nojima wanted Final Fantasy VII to be an endless battle between Sephiroth and Cloud in the original game, but that isn’t what the original text boils down to. The original text is about spirituality, grief, environmentalism. It isn’t about Sephiroth. If it was, in fact, about the spiky haired amnesiac fighting the silver haired guy with the long sword, there would have been more of that in the game. Instead, Sephiroth is just a villain to frame the adventure around, a means to bring the player to each beat in the story. He doesn’t do much of anything in the original game because it would interfere with the themes being explored through each character’s story. This idea that the original text would have been better with 80% more Sephiroth is grotesque to me.
I can’t imagine that Stephen King imagined the final chapters of The Dark Tower unfolding as they did before his traumatic accident in 1999. The accident informs the work, changed the way he envisioned it. Whether or not you think the final books in King’s epic are good are beside the point because they are what the author wrote, and it is there for us to experience as it is.
Final Fantasy VII Remake spoiler ahead.
This is a bit unfair. I really just think Zack is an awful, boring character.
Zack Fair walking through a portal at the end of Final Fantasy VII Remake was a Greedo Shot First moment for me. It completely undermines the meaning of the original text and reveals the remake to be exactly what it is: fan service, or even more accurately, fan fiction. You might like fan fiction, may enjoy writing it, but you have to admit that, on some level, you don’t get fan fiction without the original text existing.
That anyone thinks that Nojima meant for Zack Fair to be alive in the original game is appalling to me. It’s revisionist history. It’s deeply boring and cynical. It’s exploitative. It appeals to fans and no one else.
The Golden Age of Remasters
As I write this, Limited Run Games has collected remasters of Rocket Knight Adventures and Felix the Caton sale, marking the first time these games have been legally available since their original releases. Similarly, the boutique publisher and developer has sold a remastered rerelease of the obscene and awfulPlumbers Don’t Wear Ties, which launches digitally in March 2024. Konami has released numerous collections of classic games, Atari and Digital Eclipse released a monstrous documentary-esque collection with Atari 50. For all of the doom and gloom about the 87% of lost games, there is an effort being made in some corners of the industry to preserve and revive games that were left in the past. It isn’t difficult to play a game as bland and lifeless as Cybermorph or as challenging as Gimmick in 2024. The work is being done to keep these games alive.
Don’t skip this game! It’s great!
When the topic of games being remade comes up online, I immediately say “remaster or port only” I do not want a reimagining. I do not want remakes. I do not need games to have up to date graphics and retooled gameplay. Turn based games do not need to be made into action games. Action games, likewise, don’t need to be turn based. The original games were the way they were for a reason, top to bottom, and should retain those decisions as they are rereleased for modern players. I will give a pass to things like save states and rewind features. They are staples of emulation platforms, and can ultimately be ignored.
If you’ve reached the end of this piece, thank you for reading. Please understand that I’m not out to take the fun away from you, nor am I suggesting that the old video games are somehow better than new ones. They are different. The past isn’t wholly good or bad for any medium. But video games, like any art form, have a rich enough history that there will always be lessons waiting for the next generation to tap into. When we demand a remake, we are, in some form, asking to erase the original texts. To make them hard to access. The remake will be on new code, more likely to be retained and reused to sell the game again in the future. A remaster, port, or emulated rerelease may have problems, but they will give a player a far more interesting look into a work than a remake ever can. Because the art is in the original text. The remake is just tracing the outlines.
WordsThing 