Anybody remembers the existential anxiety the game could induce, eg. the future Kakariko's graveyard race through NEON torch flames in darkness (whyyy???? why NOW, why not earlier or later in the game??), dark hollow ambience instead of merry happy We're Racing - music, all the while trying to process that cool kind gravekeeper is fucking dead and still around to obsessively challenge you to a race??? aaaa.

I get what you mean. I don't want to make this the Zelda thread, but I was just playing the game for the first time in years and it made me think of these posts. When I was playing, it struck me how the tech of the 64 pushed the developers to use simple graphics. And this creates striking visual features. A statue dominates an entire room, a neon torch path lights a makeshift raceway. How exciting to play with graphics in this way without the burden of creating a realistic enough scenario with enough textures and random debris everywhere.

With the dark streak in the games I don't know if the Zelda people are getting more sentimental with age, or if the low graphics acted as a natural counterbalance to make all the severe content seem appropriately lighthearted and just whimsical enough

The other thing that got me was the fleeting way moments happen. There's almost a modern conception of gaming where in order for a moment to have value, it has to have the potential to occur again and again. It doesn’t matter that you'll never experience all these moments, it doesn’t matter that these moments lose their impact with each repetition. Conceptually when you think about games, the simple pretense has to be there.

In Ocarina, a lot of little moments come and go, without a broader system present that's trying to justify them and elaborate on them. The opposite of this is the idea around the game DayZ, which was huge a few years back, where the idea of playing an infinitely repeating zombie scenario, despite the actual experience of playing the game, is so appealing to people.

Ocarina feels like a written story, other modern big world games are fun but more like a wikipedia page or a textbook. More logical and procedural than they are abstract and fictional, a simulation of a real or imagined place, rather than an effort at using specific techniques to craft specific impressions. And by technique I mean like, in Ocarina, they don't let you in the castle, you only ever look through a window and catch a glimpse of the game's internal politics and its badguy, this distance makes the game feel so big in its scope, more so than all the directly realized castles in Skyrim.

Like the other poster said, these are things you lose when you make the games so full of self aware design choices, like in Link Between Worlds becoming a painting as a puzzle gimmick. A modern open world game is so fixated on the idea of immersive total simulation that you don't get stylistic choices which mimic the narrative fullness you get from a book, modern Zelda is too self acknowledging and too academic with its design to have any narrative pretense whatsoever

Unfortunately both of those changes end up coming entirely at the cost of immersion, which wouldn't be too high a cost to pay if it were literally any other series.

The good Zeldas will usually have elements that raise up the game and make it basically more than the sum of its parts, the Fairies in Ocarina Of Time introduce normal fairy fountains, which are like a weird fantasy dimension poking through otherwise mundane locations. At the very least, the fountains make the environment feel as though it's populated with bizarre secrets. The fact that they heal is a pretty small component of their overall character, compared to other games.

Similarly, the collectable spiders in Ocarina are a weird infestation, with the same dark, mystical air of the rest of the game. They scratch around on the side of a barn while the farmer is sleeping and you're out snooping around on his property. They're exactly the kind of thing you need to see to make darkness in the game feel like the dead of night. The atmosphere this builds is realized seamlessly through gameplay and astonishingly elevates what should be a dumb collectable.

The Ghost collectable in Twilight Princess is a standard part of the Zelda recipe and fills out its role nicely, this is where its characteristics begin and end. Actually they're kind of annoying to get because you have to turn into a wolf first and then fight with the ghost. There is bug collecting in both Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword, but in both cases they’re both clearly pointing to conventions established by the series' basic formula. It's nothing like Ocarina, where the spider effectively captures the feeling of being out at night and expecting something to scratch around in the darkness.

In TP it seems like they were kind of losing the essence of the prior games as a result of following form too strictly, Skyward Sword and Link Between Worlds and the DS games seems more like semi-intentionally breaking away the muddy, overlapping parts of the games and introducing elements in their place that are streamlined, smart design choices. So the weapons and other elements in Worlds are fixed, but now lack all their holistic properties. Nothing in the game is going to feel like exploring at nighttime, though the different parts of the game may click together all in a very sensible way. Frankly this follows other trends by other Nintendo franchises where the intellectual properties are fully manifested as exaggerated, safe, and reliable representations of themselves. But this isn't all or even mostly an outcome of business, I do think that there are very real creative difficulties in reproducing the qualities of a good Zelda game.

Speaking purely creatively, I don't think it's that surprising that initial attempts at these games sort of hit the mark perfectly. When you have no preconception of how you should approach a game like this, you just have to be honest with how things fit or don't fit the mood/tone. It's later on that you get faint echoes once you establish too strongly a certain formal method of thinking about and producing these games.

played through most of RE2 last night and made a video about it to kind of get it out of my system. mostly talking about prerendered backgrounds, i miss em
 
http://youtu.be/Q2PDstTaqrs

 
This is really great. I think you're right on about the cuffs at the 4 minute mark. It's as though signifiers like these can't exist in modern games because the sort of ethos at hand is that we create everything, so much, until enough stuff has been rendered to create the illusion of direct one-to-one reality, but nothing significant can be put in these environments because they're immediately lost in the noise. To say nothing of the special advantages of a fixed perspective.
 
The words you chose regarding the story "a layer of strangeness and detachment" are perfect, especially in a game like Silent Hill 2. Compare SH2 to the modern Silent Hill Downpour and you can see the trap the developers have gotten themselves into. Their fixation on logic and pretense sticks them with this main guy who's the unfortunate embodiment of a boring horror protagonist, you don't know what to do with the character and so every word they utter is lame disbelief.

strange game. it claims to have a lot going on under the hood stylistically/thematically, but you play it for a while and it's really just another pretty brainless, tiresome sandbox game without a lot of particularly rewarding stuff to do or things happening. it's kinda sad. the game desperately wants to be a slightly objective criticism of the way games work and the way we percieve this sort of thing, but what ultimately happens is that the game doesn't really go into areas fundamentally different from your standard call of duty game, meaning that you aren't going to really get anything from this deliberately awful depiction of human cruelty than one that does so out of its own obliviousness. the whole game is about showing rather identical levels of murder and destruction that you see in every other game, but not attempting to cover up those problems with stuff like ITS OK YOU'RE A MARINE or HEY THEY WERE ZOMBIES IT'S COOL, you see this stuff for what it is and how much it breeds unhealthy ways of thinking. that's in the ballpark of a neat idea i guess, but i think we're inadvertently there already, a lot of games are so unconvincing in their narratives that it's pretty easy to get sidetracked and see this objectively. i don't think we needed this much help. that this is pretty much all the game has going for it made it rather underwhelming.

 
In the article you linked the guy being interviewed seems to view stories in games as duct tape used to cover up logical deficiencies caused by the gameplay, but gameplay always tends to round itself out within its own logical system where action-reaction, cost-reward systems carry along momentum pretty well devoid of exterior narrative coherency. So yeah I think you're right, putting the narrative at odds with the gameplay as a way of fully displaying the ugliness of these games is kind of bunk because the gameplay has a self-sustaining consistency anyway no matter what narrative gets applied. And using this exact kind of violent gameplay to explore and diminish violent gameplay is too convenient, like advertising that goes after the common cliches of advertising in order to mock itself and sarcastically make its claims, I don't think anything great is going on in these sorts of processes.
 
I assume the difference between spec ops and Farcry is a qualitative change in content and not just metaphorical character which is supposed to exorcise the content of its banality.
 

The GTA series has always been a fairly self-aware parody of crime culture, and American culture in general, but I do think the latest game stands out particularly in how far it's pushing that angle. Like you mentioned, the 3 main characters are basically walking trope criminals, the bitter white retired bank robber going through a mid-life crisis, the baller from the hood boosting cars and dreaming big, and the psychopath with a troubled childhood who's just sooooo craaaazzyyyy. Unfortunately I don't think the game is particularly sharp or clever in it's commentary, it just comes off as kind of dumb and parroting instead of actually interesting. Everything in the game is just a parody or reference to something with no bite behind it - it's basically just going "haha look how shallow and hypocritical this aspect of American culture is" which by itself is pretty boring.

 
This is exactly right, everything is a walking odd man against your straight man, it's a completely juvenile picture of the world as everything being stupider than you. Just directionless cynicism.
 
I went back to Balled of Gay Tony to remind myself of these games and the way they transmute real human action into the game world is completely bizarre, like you press a complex web of buttons to drink champagne and then spray it around and dance, the blunt translation of these delicate human affairs is like a sea lion slapping its fins against a piano. The internet in GT4 met with all this fanfare on review sites but it's just an inexplicable collection of images and text, like of course it is, what else could it be? As if the GTA world is finally coming alive and now it possesses the final dimension.

ack, i just wrote a massive diatribe about various games i'm playing, then i realised i know nothing about game design, and should probably delete it, which i did.
 
just to put something useful in the thread: i have quite enjoyed: RE:Make, Eternal Darkness (still not sure, but it's interesting), that new Mario on 3DS, and Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate lately.

 
As someone with 14 posts I think you should weigh in because there are other threads I see bemoaning the lack of content on this site.
 
Survival horror and Resident Evil Remake and Eternal Darkness are some personal favorites of mine, although ED is one game I think of strongly that didn't age well, but I want to see its style and ideas continued on in further games. I remember the magic system being awesome.
 
RE:Make is probably the only reboot or recreation of a series where I think the outcome is a positive one, normally the aesthetic style at the time of creation plays into the gestalt of elements, and if you change aesthetic you affect the overall coherency of the game, that's what I think. Not here though, everything wonderfully falls into place and no better looking game has ever been created. The game also has proper use of cut scenes (I think) where interruptions in the gameplay is supplemental rather than it's own miniseries that's fighting the gameplay for time.

I just began playing a I think 2005 PC horror game called Pathologic, it's translated sort of awkwardly from Russian, and because of that everything in dialogue has a David Lynch Twin Peaks kind of feel.
 
The worst thing about Pathologic to me is that when I was reading about it one review site put up a picture of the most interesting piece of architecture in the game and stopped me from experiencing it in a surprising way, and every time I see this building it frustrates me. This pic is a spoiler, like, I don't care that you tell me something like Borderlands 2 falls in line with hackneyed sci-fi plots, but when you take the best aesthetic part of the game and put it in my face before I can experience it first hand I find that poor form. I would rather never divulge any information about my favorite work in a medium if doing so meant I would ruin the joy of discovery and give the person a half-realized experience with what I'm trying to sell to them.
 
But the game is wonderful, and I'm barely into it, but it realizes a lot of its themes or feelings by making you traverse large spaces of an open town (passage of time is both a mechanic and theme of the game, like think Majora's Mask how the moon falling makes time both a narrative theme and a gameplay part). It reminds me of Wind Waker in how the game forces large expanses of nothing, travel time, to evoke a certain feeling. To me this is superior to the large world fast travel loading times of a game like Skyrim, where for the sake of player convenience the world is there but never utilized, it's just bizarre accumulation of sandbox expectations, and then the player skips over it anyway.
 

1. Game design doesn't exist except as planning for game construction. It's not really a thing in itself.
2. The production of software and the production in and of the surrounding culture are inseparable.
3. The 'potential' is roughly the same as a partial mental map of a space produced by the software.
4. The game space is a dialectic between the state-space of the game software and the player-community's understanding of it. Actually it's probably a bigger dialectic mess than that but I'll have a better idea when I've finished reading Lefebvre's book (The Production of Space) and maybe done some more math. That whole research trail is a big unresolved timesink.
5. That means that's it's not so simple as I initially thought it was (flow of potential / state-space around the player-character). It's not wholly determined by the player's abilities because the player's expectations, their limited information about the data and rules of the game, and the situation of the whole thing in a wider cultural web.

 
I really like this post but I never replied at the time because I had nothing to add. BUT in Pathological time is a resource, and that's rare, when I see discussion of time restraints I usually only see frustration, and I wonder if that's what this post was partly getting at, that (for example) time as a tool to use in game is not available because the lexicon of seeing these things as game parts rather than unfair restrictions is simply not on the table. When you say culture I imagine at least you're referring to player expectations based on past experiences.

As for what I think of it thus far more specifically, I wonder if they have completely abandoned duel wielding. its looks to be so. Even though I disliked it in the very game that introduced (halo 2) it I felt that it really broadened the strategy of Halo 3 so I bet the game is weaker for it. Not that it isn't fun. It certainly is.

 
Yeah the lack of variety does hurt the game. I think 343 really did themselves in with this preset loadout system, it essentially traps everything at two tiers, the starting guns that have to be crazy balanced because they're starting weapons, and then the second level tier two stuff you can earn through kills. So unless you have one of the bonus guns getting you some easy points, the game grinds down to who can use the starting weapon the most efficiently, it's like you said, there's less breathing room for strategy. And many times, once relative skill with the predominant starting gun becomes established, it feels like moving through a race where you're all at constant speeds, constant relative positions, driving but going nowhere. There isn't a countermove/counterweapon that you can try, you just kind of trudge along.
 

I don't particularly feel that there is an opposition between those two qualities. Particularly, if you consider "mechanics" to their finest grained, they are a complex of human biocultural stuffs and computer software (itself material culture & technology). This is the same stuff that produces spatiality in games. As approaches, though, they might be distinct. A mechanical approach tends to be focused on more board-gamey macro design, whereas an approach focused on experience might focus on the aesthetic qualities of particular components (software and otherwise) of the game. There is also a literary approach, which treats games as a narrative text. I suspect that range of such approaches exist. In the sense that you may invest your time into one approach or the other & must manage conceptual conflicts between serving the needs of each, I guess that you could consider there being an opposition between them. But reconciliations and combined approaches are certainly possible, so by working at it, the seemingly opposed may meld into a third thing. For me, games are programs produced by doing work & cooperating. As software is such an astoundingly general thing, it naturally welcomes many different approaches.

 
Yes exactly, I don't think there's any opposition between immersive gaming and mechanics, where we might disagree (I don't know) is that I think immersive stuff simply won't exist until they have corresponding gameplay mechanics.
 
When I see a wall I can jump off of in Super Mario 64 I think that imbues it with a kind of potentiality, and that neither detracts nor sits separate from its aesthetic or immerisve value. In fact I think this is laying the ground work for certain kinds of emotions to occur. Moving a floating camera through a hallway in Mario 64 is I think very different than walking along with Mario down that same hallway. That hallway is made manifest beyond being a 3D shape because of Mario's abilities relative to it. I think this is the same reason why that Grandpa game struck a chord, pieces of the gameworld are willed into existence because of the players abilities relative to those parts of the landscape.

the_engineers_cry69, Hah Hah, no but it's actually nice to see a genuine Opposing Force...! Half Life...! like i'm totally for that n64 fog - hell but that doesn't mean game engy things are dead meat. i'd like to warn though that a knee-jerk reaction what would warrant to this - let's just focus excessively on gaming mechanics! - is itself a dangerous waters, covered in layers of sticky nerdy-gamer-cultural debris secretion where the opposite qualities are equally discriminated (and i'd argue even more so than the opposite, due to already technical-centered and -minded - culture of gamers and gaming itself).
maybe in this light you see why i don't see a problem with people (finally?) exploring the somewhat unexplored qualities in gaming, even though it's a bummer that people pick on the fad and fill it with their egoistic shit? condescenment in this post is unintentional, i could screen it thoroughly for that but nahhh not this time

Ha! At first I thought you were calling me condescending in my post. So whatever condescenment was in your post was, as you can imagine, a great relief after that.
 
I want to make it clear that I'm not arguing against weirdness in games, we both value that but I guess I just see a different method of getting there, I'm also not interested in shutting out certain types of experiences as though they're a threat to me, but I do think that the procedure in Proteus (as far as I can tell) runs counter to its aims, and that's because effects won't emerge out of nothing. Experiences won't emerge out of AAA cinematics, experiences won't emerge out of similar vacuums.

I was looking at videos of Proteus and it got me to thinking what people picture when they imagine a video game.
 
I think there's a strain of conceptualizing games that doesn't understand how to put them together, and that's common with a lot of things, just thinking in general. You just have an idea, and it's vague, and you're happy with it until some force compels you to spell it out and then you see how undeveloped your thought is. Like I was posting in a Zelda thread and people were coming in and saying basically “yeah I'd like a Zelda that's basically, like, you can explore and the world is kind of open, and then maybe there's stuff to do”. I'm not fuming, and I don't think these people are stupid, it's just kind of funny to me when people take this vagueness out of their mind and they don't realize it's still incredibly vague when it hits the air and oxidizes. And then people will try to stretch out this opinion like it means something, this foggy idea of a game as an open place to explore and, then, stuff happens, I guess.
 
The continuing strain of this can I think be seen in indie games, where you have a rejection of open world objectives, which in light of games like Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, and other games like that, I don't think is unreasonable. A lot of games have open worlds and it just becomes dead space. But this indie reaction to that is in the same vein of that thinking, “we still have an open landscape with scenery in it, but instead of including tedious stuff let's just cut out gameplay altogether”, and that somehow makes the game more pure.
 
There's this incredible sophistication in board games, and all these rudimentary building blocks are exploding into being, and you have designers taking these things, having a firm grip on them, a firm idea of them, and combining them together to create a sort of gaming Renaissance. But video games are mired in this swamp, where the picture increasingly seems to come into view as being: “a game, at its ideal, is some kind of open space or something” and then it ends. It's just so unclear. And the implications are easy to see. Like, for example, chasing after movie qualities for validation and content filling essence. That's a symptom of this half-formed conception floating in people's minds, this interpretation covered up hazardously by N64 fog.

The original Zelda also has no frame of reference points. There are no towns or strictly built buildings that add shape to everything and put everything into a relative scope. There's nothing that assigns size and function to the landscape around you. Even when you meet NPCs they sit in some black pit purgatory. Everything is shapeless and formless and representative or symbolic, like a cutaway for a classic RPG battle. In those little battles there's likewise nothing to assign exactly what this is that's happening.

The town in Link to the Past is I think precisely why I rank it lower than NES Zelda. I hate this thing plopped in the middle of the map/world that signifies exactly the parameters of absolutely everything else. At the very least it's describing the scope of all the landscape around you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_WkbC4lh4k

this is a real commercial on daytime tv

Objections to commercials like this are always put in the form of “oh, what if you had your 5 year old daughter on the couch with you” or some vague “is this appropriate?” but really it’s just embarrassing to have sexuality attached to products. It’s such a ridiculous prospect that you can plainly say this is an awful way to format life.

I can imagine bloggers saying “oh but here the woman is turning the men into an object how transgressive” or “how many layers of irony, very effective humor” and I see an image of these people in theater seats clapping at a pile of garbage in a junkyard.

My drive to have every game is much less than it once was but I consider this helpful and the result of forming individual tastes and formalizing in my head the flaws I once passed over when I was younger.

That sounds dismissive, sorry. Life to me is a process of reducing options through continuing awareness of context. If I begin to notice that randomly pounding the keys on the piano does not sound good that isn't an indication of diminishing passion for the piano, I'm just beginning to realize what good choices are, and that adds value I think to my choices and offers more opportunities to appreciate good music.

I don’t desperately want to rent every game on the shelf at Blockbuster like I once did, but the games I play now, and enjoy, I enjoy them in a way that dwarfs my past experiences. No bluff here.

also Greek mythology etc. etc. did I ever mention a Dragon Warrior clone based on the Bible could be really good. Like just make it this completely unironic JRPG and like the bosses are Levithan Bahamut or whatever all those guys are and then Satan etc. and instead of command 'magic' it's miracles or something. Except Jesus is called Iesu like in Japanese because that's actually a pretty epic name and fits into the status box as 4 characters

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOGYrLCBLmk lol

but yeah it shouldn't be preachy it should be treated as mythologically as GLORY OF HERACLES etc. just exploiting epicness of the Bible as a story

do people still identify with Greek Roman mythology as their religion like on censuses and stuff btw I believe in the GODS Apollo etc. probably this with Norse mythology like a bunch of metalheads also Nazis maybe

basically there is a severe lack of RPGs based on the Abrahamic religions besides like MAGIC OF SHEHEREZADE maybe. Along the lines of Bible RPG you should get to play as Moses and shit. On that note be as serious or exaggerated as you want with enemies (Moses fights MUMMIES and shit)

The bible thing makes me think of the Earthbound series, which I've coincidently never played so this is speculation, and the idea of rich thorough games like RPGs grounding themselves in more relatable context closer to where we sit. Is part of the appeal of the Earthbounds their mundane context, suburban America, and then the contrast of fantastic within this setting? Is part of the appeal like I said the pure familiarity? I think about a game like Phantasy Star Online which drenches itself in its own universe with lore and specific esoteric language, wholly made up exotic words end up meaning “lower defense”.

My point is that these games which revel in their alieness seem so off putting at times, like I don’t want to get into the Final Fantasys because I don’t care about Chokobos or whatever. There’s a great appeal in making something with a real world association. I enjoy the Ogre Battle games because their specifics seem like familiar archetypes of medieval combat rather than a fully new medieval tangent abstraction. There’s also the fact that real-world “things” have a stronger integrity than fictional stuff, there’s less breaks in believability because it does all actually exist and you’re drawing on that. It’s not like Star Wars where there’s minor, and minor, and minor inconsistency which eat away at you. Invoking the Greek Gods evokes a naturally stronger sense of integrity because they are born out of a gauntlet of years and years of real world creation and thought, they stand up better, by their nature, and I think that registers with people in subtle ways.

This is exactly the impression I got when I started playing The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. Maybe they handled it in that game slightly better than the people that designed the game you are talking about, but it's still insufferably frustrating for a task that is in principle pointlessly straightforward. Like for a little while I could be okay with playing through those annoying obligatory tutorial styled bits at the beginning parts, but then I get hit with some stupid oblivious little ledge and even after finding it after searching the same area for 20-40 minutes straight (ok, so you force me to hold hands with you through EVERY SINGLE ASPECT OF THE GAME EXCEPT THIS ONE PART WHERE YOU LOOK FOR A STUPID LEDGE TO SHIMMY ACROSS?), any desire I have to keep playing immediately gets sapped from my person.

Even if the game gets better later on, this thought lingers in my mind as something the designers established that you can possibly encounter, but still never see coming, and I can no longer enjoy anything else in that game that is still worth enjoying.

I remember having this thought about SS that its stream of helpful information was so extensive, and so overwhelming, that it eventually becomes entirely unhelpful and serves to negate itself. There is so much to sift through that your mind glazes over and takes for granted that you're being told nothing, so whatever real, valid, pieces of information are in there are being lost in this sea of dialogue.

I remember one point where I was talking to a raccoon thing in a tree, and it had so much to tell me, I was just scrolling through the text because I was tired. And in the text is this specific instruction to go to some completely arbitrary place on the map that has some symbol on it to unlock the next section.

So here, instead of there being some deductive process where you're left alone to consider the environment and use what you know about it to find the next area, the game just directly tells you where to go. Holds your hand. But ultimately the dialogue used to explain the solution is so bloated that I just tune it all out "I'll just figure it out as I go along". And I ended up thinking this symbol I needed to look at was the door. But in reality that symbol was just a symbol to later reproduce on the real door which is over on the other side of the map.

This happened a lot in the game, where the NPCs would just explicitly tell you what to do and remove the problem solving from your end of things. And the game is forced to do this, I think, because the overworld in this Zelda is like the aftermath of the explosion of something more cohesive, like we're playing across broken shards. There's such a lack of logic to the landscape that you can't base any problem solving or implied natural progression around its layout.

 I've been playing Silent Hill Downpour and prior to getting the game, during the hype leading up to its release, I remember thinking it looked like it suffered from this syndrome where every area is so full of stuff that you mind glazes over everything. There are no focal points that draw attention because the designers behind the game think that world design means filling, and filling, and filling until every corner is stuffed with clutter. It makes me pine for the 64 days when levels had to have focal points and set pieces because you just couldn’t fill worlds with all that much detail.

This clutter syndrome is something I understood after playing Resident Evil 5, and I expected more of that in Downpour, just unimpressive levels that feel like nothing because there’s no coherence to them, it’s just junk to fill space. But this game is awful, the pure amount of stuff, the darkness, the way your flashlight hardly moves, and the fact that the main character obscures everything, it makes this game unbearable. It’s like you can’t get comfortable with it. It never sits right with you, and all you can do is press forward through it. There’s no familiarity to achieve.


The more I play this game the more it reminds me of like, an NES title, where you’re playing a game from a time when most designers just didn’t know how to treat players and they put the most frustrating shit in the game. Downpour is increasingly becoming a 3D equivalent of that. Just with, like, unexplained paths that look like nothing. There’ll be a row of junk, and it’s so visually busy, like everything else in this game, that your mind passes over it and you register it as another nonsensical border on the level, the kind that anyone IRL could just hop over (you know the kind of boarder I’m talking about), but this border has a little slit in the side of it and you can slide through it. You have this arbitrary slide move that let’s you fit through tight spaces, and you use it here on this thing that looks like a border because the designers don’t know how to direct the eye, they have no idea how to use space. It’s awful. That’s what I mean about NES era kinds of design obliviousness.

I picked this game up because I thought, despite everything that looked bad about it, I could just wander through its weird and bad spaces and take them in as what they are, but the design of this game prevents that and it’s straining on the eye to play this game, or to move through it in an attentive way. I can go to a used game shop and pick up some 64 era four-dollar game just with the intent to move through its space and take it all in, even though the gameplay is surely terrible. It’s crazy to me that hackey designers are using this bounty of technology to produce these incredibly forced ways to make environments undecipherable. It drives me nuts. It’s like the worst parts of consumerism and shlocky design sloshing together to create something with no value, not even in a distanced diagnostic or investigative sense where you just get the game to enjoy its oddities.

I'm playing Resident Evil Zero right now at this moment and I'm moving giant chess pieces and they are spraying poisonous gas up at me but somehow all of this seems natural and not unexpected.

Prince of Persia Sands of Time, Beyond Good and Evil, and Resident Evil Zero are good.

There's a game called Lost Kingdoms that came out early in the Gamecube's life where you use cards to fight in real time. So, you have a card that lets you slash with a sword three times before it discards, you have cards that summon companions and so on. It's good and has probably a more interesting combat system than most current games.

Eternal Darkness

I beat Eternal Darkness I think three times during the last generation of games and I went back to it recently for a revisit and as soon as I got to the meat of the game of moving through empty and linear hallways and hitting guys with a sword my excitement for the whole experience evacuated my mind like water rushing out of a dam.