seth-zone

[seth-zone]

i need everyone to stop what they are doing right now and look at the reveal trailer for Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore. a whole ass spiritual successor to the CD-i Zelda games replicating the entire look and feel, with painted backgrounds and wonky animated cutscenes and the ORIGINAL VOICE ACTORS for LINK AND ZELDA??? IT'S SO INSANEEEEEEEE

[seth-zone]

@gomjabbar had a really good idea and i had to actualize it

[seth-zone]

we all laughed when the king said “this peace is what all true warriors strive for” but you know what? that was the realest shit he ever said

[seth-zone]

Reblog this or die.

[seth-zone]

This will forever be the best comment I’ve ever read in my life

[seth-zone]

This might be the worst thing I've ever made.

I dreamt that Steve Martin looked really depressed about his new shitty manicure, and then a sassy Justin Timberlake slides in with perf glittery nails and says, “It be like that sometimes”. Had to have my husband bring it to life.

[seth-zone]

Scoob doob doo where you

we got work

Scoob doob doo where where where

we need help

cum on scoob

C U

make believe that you are in possession of these GREAT things we bought at a walmart for 3.50 they’re called slithers

you’re not me

i see

shakin n quake’n

you see wee gee the meesteeree tee seev see sceebeedee be reedee fee yee ack

i’m back

and scooboodoo oof yoo coom throo yoo goonoo hoovoorsoovoscooboosnook

back in black

scoob doob doo here here here

you’re bed is really livin’

we can count

scoobadeedoo

i’ve bought a toy of Krillin

[seth-zone]

Super Mario 64 Review

Image credit: mariowiki.com (sourced from Nintendo’s original promo materials)

One must wonder how it feels to have created a game like Super Mario 64. It’s a work so seminal, so important, that people continue to mark it as the point where 3D gaming truly began. Too often, Nintendo gets more credit than they deserve… Mario 64 is by no means the first 3D game, the first 3D platformer, or any of the other firsts it’s sometimes credited with. Considering that it’s harder to remember those games than Mario 64, it’s fairer to say Mario 64 is the first truly excellent 3D game. No, Nintendo deserves the credit they get because even though they might not be the first, they’re always the best.

Just about everyone possibly reading this has played the game, so it’s pointless to discuss the revolutionary analog controls, the game loop (jumping into paintings to go to new worlds, completing the Star objectives, beating the Bowser bosses), or the dated but quaint polygonal graphics. Instead, it’s more important to list the little anecdotes that make people swell inside. Imagine an after-school program where the well-worn N64 had a copy of SM64 running near-constantly, where every kid did the Princess Secret Slide star and then left Mario to idle in his electronic playground. Recall the terror of the hungry piano, munching after Mario. Fuzzy, otherworldly feelings shoulder the over-saturated colors of the prototypical 3D worlds the player explores; Jolly Roger Bay embolizes this haunting but beautiful atmosphere, with both the most memorable enemy (the giant eel) and song of the game.

The Eel, awaiting dinner. Image credit: joshuarivers

This game feels nothing like the classic Mario games of yore. The faces and places are familiar – Peach, Mario, Bowser, Toad, Goombas, Koopas, the Princess’ Castle – but the way the game is played and the spaces traversed distances itself heavily from the 2D iterations. The decision to choose a free-roaming objective-based style of gameplay over simply crafting a 2D Mario level from behind isn’t just bold, it’s downright bizarre. It’s impossible to see Nintendo as anything but visionary; Mario was used as a canvas for a new playstyle Nintendo wanted. Nobody else could have done this.

Super Mario 64 displays a level of confidence Nintendo didn’t have again for years. It again uses Miyamoto’s signature guided-hand design mantra, but with even less guidance this time, thrusting the player into the game with little to no tutorial. Jumping through giant portraits of the levels is the only way to access the insides of the worlds the painting detailed. It’s hard to pinpoint when players figured out how to do this, but it feels like it’s something that’s just always been known. Think about how to cross Bob-Omb Battlefield and get to King Bob-Omb. The star’s hint text suggests a straightforward clue: Big Bob-Omb on the Summit.  It’s hard to think of a time where the path wasn’t ingrained into player’s minds permanently. With no tutorial, no overt text, no glowing guiding markers, millions of players figured out which direction to go and how to defeat the boss at the top. If that isn’t incredible game design, what is?

Defeating the Chain Chomp in a novel way. Image credit: suppermariobroth.

The ability to clear the Stars in ways other than how it’s scripted is so novel, it won’t reappear in even Nintendo’s own games for years to come. There’s an owl in Whomp’s Fortress that spawns when the star ‘Fall Onto Caged Island’ is selected. The intended method to clear this objective is to ride the owl to the cage and fall into it. Many players had no idea about this, most of them (including the author of this piece) simply leaped and climbed and finagled their way into the cage. This sort of open-ended design is the truly momentous achievement of Super Mario 64, the secret sauce that countless designers continue to use for their own games.

There’s not a lot to knock the game on that’s not related to its age – the difficulty is uneven, the goals can be obtuse, and the repetition of tasks and bosses is wearisome – but mostly, the biggest hurdle is how old it feels. As we get farther from the release date of early 3D efforts such as this one, it’s harder to recommend them to players today. Super Mario 64 is a truly excellent game, but the flaws that are there are harder to ignore when they’ve been improved upon by its successors. It’s always worth experiencing a landmark work of art, however, so if a player can look past the layers of dust time has worn onto the game, they’ll find an experience that changed how the world made video games.

Image credit: n64thstreet

Verdict: Recommended

[seth-zone]

L.A. Noire Review

Image Credit: PressStartOnce via YouTube

L.A. Noire, the quasi-adventure game about a troubled detective solving police cases in 1947 Los Angeles, was one of my backlog white whales. I bought it sometime on sale in 2012, while in college, upon the recommendation of one of my good friends. It was still fairly recent at the time, and I had a new gaming PC that could make it look great (or as great as it can look, seeing as it’s locked to 30fps due to technical restraints). So now (oddly enough, timed with the announcement of the remasters - I swear this was not on purpose) I’ve finally plowed through it. My thoughts? Well, it wavers between a thumbs down and a meh face.

It’s a game of great ambition. I can respect the advancements it brought to physical, realistic storytelling in games (though the quality of the narrative itself is another matter entirely) with some impressive tech that works well...so long as you ignore the fact that the bodies are rigid corpses. The idea - to take a fancy depth-filled video file of an actor’s face and map it onto a character model - is novel, and for the game’s purposes fits pretty well. The texture work (the hair and the quality of the facial model, in particular) leans towards being bad. Decent enough for a game in development for the better part of a decade, released last generation, I suppose.

It sounds like I’m overtly focused on the game’s graphics; I haven’t mentioned much else! Unfortunately, the main hook of the game involves reading people’s faces and determining whether they’re truthful, stretching the truth, or outright fibbing - and this makes the technology the number one focus. While the performances themselves are generally outstanding (yes, including the infamous zoom in on the old man), the telegraphing of these feelings is not felt during gameplay. The actors will often time greatly exaggerate their facial movements to assist in your conversation analysis...this doesn’t help. Apparently the options for interrogation were switched at the end of development, so reasonable choices (some people do not look like they are telling the truth at all) often end with failures.

The most truthful face. Credit: skinke via YouTube

Failure is harsh in L.A. Noire, which I suppose is refreshing and authentic, since your choices cannot be done over unless you save scum (keep reloading before that icon appears!). There are serious consequences for failing, as well - entire sections of the story can be blocked off and future cases affected. This would be rewarding if making judgment calls with often time ridiculous and flimsy evidence was so baffling. Perhaps I'm just bad at reading faces, but my wife - who loves detective and mystery media, so this was up her alley - also had great difficulty picking the right things. I’m not ashamed to say I resorted to a guide many times just to finish the rote story.

L.A. Noire is extremely repetitive. Each case is an ‘episode’ of sorts, and it almost needs to be treated like that to play without coming away bored. The Homicide cases in particular were barely a step above mind numbing - the same exact thing plays out so many times, with you repeating the same type of actions over and over. It starts to feel a bit better by the end, but you’re largely doing the same actions over and over. Repetition is a natural part of video games, but the game loop must support the repetition lest it gets...well, boring. The game attempts to vary things up with shooting/chase/action sequences that appear ripped from the Uncharteds of the day. Would you be surprised if I told you that so many of these same types of scenes played out, it also got repetitive?

Picking up various things until it zooms in, guessing your way through conversations, and participating in the same exact types of cover based shootouts/on foot chase sequences/car ramming segments make up your roughly 30 hours of L.A. Noire. I assume you’ll play the complete edition, which has the DLC cases intact. I almost warn against it, because the game seems to never end. When it does end, oh boy does it end poorly. That’s an excellent segue into the game’s other mysterious problem - the narrative.

One of a thousand chase sequences (though this may be a bullshot). Image Credit: IGDB Press Kit

The game was mired in development hell. Though finished, the studio that made it - Team Bondi - was forced to close its doors. If Rockstar had not contributed extensively, the game would had remained vaporware. Nowhere is this more evident that the story. Left with mostly mediocre-to-sometimes-good gameplay, you would hope the intriguing narrative would keep players hooked. The story is a mess. Vague flashback sequences recall your player character, Cole Phelps, and a squad of various marines fighting it out in WWII. The dialogue and writing in the game (especially in these sequences) leave a lot to be desired, but this and the newspaper clippings you find (which trigger cutscenes of other events) form the thread of storyline carried across the cases.

Eventually, Cole falls from grace. Without spoiling too much, he does something out of character which leads to his demotion in the police force. This event is, as I just mentioned, so incredibly out of character, bizarre, and left unexplained that I’ve figured it was left in the game for the sake of a story point. After this happens, the game attempts to tie together the aforementioned flashbacks and newspaper cutscenes into one coherent narrative. It doesn’t work. You care nothing about any of the characters (who are all terribly unlikable) and once the ultimate ‘conspiracy’ of sorts is ready to be exposed and the story ready to climax, the ending just sort of farts out a poor conclusion with one of the dumbest deaths seen in a AAA title.

It’s downright insulting to someone who had to endure some pretty boring segments. People talk some trash about Final Fantasy XV (another game mired in development hell) having an incoherent, unfinished story with a bad ending (and those people are not wrong)...where was the outrage for this game? It had to be the technology. It truly was amazing for the time, but I think it blinded people from the game’s serious problems. Six years later, the tech still looks good, but advances in body and facial motion capture (see Uncharted 4) have all but rendered it redundant. Good looking faces can’t save boring gameplay nowadays - it’ll be interesting to see how public opinion changes (if at all, which I greatly suspect it will) with the release of the remaster. I appreciate the effort of the developers to try something new, but I’m more grateful the game is out of my backlog.

Verdict: Not Recommended

[seth-zone]

RIP kitty, I hope you have a profitable ascension into cat money heaven

[沖縄] 国際通りにいた猫。飼い主が指示すると、この状態で固まったまま動かないので、置物に見える。 百円をあげると写真を撮って良いことになるらしい。 腹に乗っている百円玉を見る限り、なかなかの稼ぎのようだ。

[seth-zone]

Big The Cat meets an untimely end in the “Croc Attack!” minigame in Sonic Shuffle. [Sonic The Hedgeblog] [Support us on Patreon]

[seth-zone]

[seth-zone]

THIS IS TERRIFYING

Sonic chatting to the kids in the bus, from Sonic’s Schoolhouse, a PC edutainment title.

[Sonic The Hedgeblog] [Support us on Patreon]

[seth-zone]