#i want to space out and be consumed by megaman content

[silenthilllz]

fucking hate people who wont leave the goddamn store so i clean it, lIEK FUCK OFF GET OUT, I NEED TO CLEAN THE STORE,

[myfriendpokey]

flat pak

i went to now play this last weekend and had a good time! there was a flatgames room, and a panel, and the latter made me think about some nightmarish circumstance where someone was questioning me about what the point of these things was. the three posts below are all pseudo-answers i sketched out.

1. i like how sexless videogames are, and how bad at representing humanity in general, i like that even hyperviolent games have this wistfulness about them, as if the only way they can grasp the human body is as it comes apart - in some provisional, stateless shape contained in but seperate from the game systems, a ghost, like those mysteriously elaborate and collisionless death animations the enemies in old shooters got before dissolving into goo. or as if they hoped the exuberance of their own approach was enough to break the carapace of the format and let something, anything, seep in from the outside....

the little guys in videogames are a gentler convention, but they're always on the verge of the same dissolution - the sketchiest of outlines, of features, a ball, a shape, with eyes and feet. like drawing yourself with your eyes closed - the crudest and most temporary kind of projection or self-fashioning. staring nervously and chomping as it waddles through the maze, eating things, breaking apart instantly when it bumps into someone, and given an equally temporary name such as walky or go-go. i love this dorkiness, this daydream of the body as a soap-bubble, so alienated that the slightest recognition feels like intimacy.

2. flatgames are 'flat' in the sense of projecting a multi-level videogame hierarchy into a single plane; the archetypical flatgame gesture is being able to walk across the textboxes. rather than systems they represent collections - collections of effects treated as independent of the wider process they'd ordinarily portray, which can then be grouped and moved around seperate from that process. so it's a personal, subjective format in the sense that the new groupings sort of mirror the groupings produced when various external effects are flattened into single moments of subjective experience, of memory. but it's also a personal format just because it's easy to use - because in many circumstances it's easier to just drag and drop text around rather than create a universal system that handles when and how it'll be displayed, as in all those unity horror games that have gui elements just sort of hanging around in space for you to bump into. and i think this is something that kind of grinds interestingly against the idea of videogames as inherently systematic, inherently good at portraying systems - like, in what way are they systematic when it's become easier NOT to be systematic? at what point do those "systematic" features become a mannerism, while the very easiness of bad game design means it starts to cleave more rigorously to the contours of actual material life and practice, to the way we really use computers rather than the ways we'd like to use them?

this is not to say systems don't exist. but their relationship with even the most system-y videogames is weird - to what extent are these games exploring a system rather than expressing a sense of systematicity, an aesthetics of system not dissimilar to those of puzzles, criticism, and the mystery novel? on one hand we know that a lot of systemic elements are hand-tweaked by developers in order to feel less jarring to our  impression of the whole (dice rolls being the most common) - on the other we know from previous twitter threads about exactly these kinds of  "cheats" that they can outrage players who learn they exist. which suggests it's not any specific quality or experience associated with a game system but the idea of systematicity itself that's being sold -- as indeed with the famous "100 hours of gameplay" tag, which does not express a type of content so much as a promise that this content has been regulated and formatted in ways which allow it to be sold in this very matter-of-fact way. the idea of systematicity as a deliberately conveyed aesthetic impression feels worth investigating, particularly given ten million youtube videos with names like "gun-shot teen DESTROYED with Logic" and "univeral reason under attack: why braingeniousmasculinist should be unbanned from club penguin" - evidently the impression of sanguine impersonality and indifference to the merely "personal" is a highly popular and profitable one online....

in a more material sense, too, we can query this systematicity. a videogame with handdrawn paper graphics is obviously not "de-mystifying" the process of making games, since the physical object had to be digitalised and cleaned up and  imported and processed before it could be used. one of the stranger things in videogames is that naivete is a technological affordance - i can use crude handdrawn graphics because the computer has enough memory not to force me to compress it all into 8x8 sprites (unless i really want it to, as with deliberately limited bespoke engines). but at the same time it really is de-mystifying, because it emphasises the extent to which game development takes place at the intersection between multiple different areas of digital technology (not to mention human labour).  3d model textures can be paintings or photographs or heavily treated, processed combinations of the two - the photographs or paintings used can be original or purchased from various weird economies of commercial asset packs - the artistic coordination of those assets can take place over skype or similar with the reference of multiple other digital image files, scavenged from online to give an idea of the total look. i don't mean to suggest that these multiple intersections are so complex that they cease to be "systematic" - but i do think that grasping it as a real system also means coming to terms with the ways in which it can be structurally unsystemisable, like fredric jameson's description of globalization as "untotalizable totality". when the most important features of the discrete operations of a computer are that they take place at a scale and speed no human can replicate, recasting exactly those operation into a human scale can confuse more than it clears up [much like this post].

thinking about videogames more generally as revolving around not an inherent systematicity but rather an image of / desire for the same, around that imagination of systematicity which is bound up with consumer technology as a whole. i feel like at each moment in history this systematicity has some privileged form of social identification associated with it: i've lost count of the pulpy books i've read which had some villainous saint-just analogue, maybe one obsessed with clocks or measuring things, who imposes some cruel and rigid revolutionary "system" on the basically warm and laissez-faire vassals below... system as political imposition. but medieval writers might have connected the same sense of systematicity more immediately with that of the kingdom of god, with the underlying structure which makes those warm laissez-faire moments possible to begin with. sometimes system appears in media as bureaucracy and ritual, sometimes it's as a challenge to bureaucracy and ritual, galileo's "and yet it moves" or those movies where someone comes up with a brilliant new way to win sports matches or sell sub-prime mortgages against all the prevailing wisdom. on the basis of this extremely rough idea, what could we imagine being the privileged form that systematicity appears in the everyday today? not capitalism or high finance, which while systematic can also be too broad or naturalised to appear so in this immediate way...  not politics, not the internet.  but maybe ON the internet, and for me "system" appears most visibly online in the question of personal information and how it's tracked. all those notifications of websites using cookies clicked through, terms and amendments to terms scrolled past, online shopping histories suddenly reoccuring by ads for the same products you looked at appearing in the background of another site - all these are re-impositions, re-appearances of systemicity through the vague fugue of internet experience. and which pop up in the more public sphere as an ominous black site, with the full scope or implications sealed away behind byzantine layers of corporate procedure and nondisclosure. the sense of system here is one of intransigence, blockage - it's divorced from the idea that knowing the system would give one the power to change it, because here the system is exactly what makes that knowledge impossible in the first place. maybe that sense of the failure of systemic knowledge is connected to the world depicted in flatgames, in which that knowledge no longer exists - niall moody's "the craigallen fire" contains historical information and real places, but the words hang eerily across the digital picture as if unsure how to relate to it, as if coming from a long way away. but the movement away from representational systematicity is a move towards material systemicness, in the clarity and concreteness with which flatgames approach their own practice, so maybe we should consider this withdrawal as strategic - as an effort to build new systems, rather than being pulled into the daydream of the old.

3. part of the pleasure, for me, in making flatgames, was the sense of feeling able to postpone indefinitely some kind of mechanical reckoning - the feeling of being able to use pacing and visual structure to ward off the dread that any minute now i'd have to settle down and make a real game. in a weird way it connects to what i enjoy about very fussy, technical games - grinding in an rpg means deferring the point at which you actually have to begin playing the rpg, both in the sense of being challenged and in the sense of actually having to sit down and learn all the systems, just as savescumming your way through megaman 3 is to giddily skate around the dread prospect of actually playing megaman 3. there is no point where you have to work out what happens if you die or walk off the map, there is no point where you have to say to the player "okay, you have to focus now". the horror of paying attention and the joy of not having to! a moment of those moralist rituals held in temporary suspense, as if time itself has frozen and you're free to walk among it, underneath paused mechanisms that would ordinarily be crushing you... and the awareness of that suspense somehow makes your own delicacy greater, as if one of the machines you wandered through was your own life, and you could hover precariously inside it... a soap bubble, the merest bug-eyed phantom, newly christened something like walky or go-go....

[image credits - street fighter iii: second impact - pippols  - space fantasy zone - marchen veil - bandits 9)

[fil-in-the-blank]

I think it’s really important to keep consuming positive fandom content even as an adult, because not only do you still need fun in your life, you should still be wanting to learn new things your whole life as well. Good media and good fandoms teach you things.

For example, I was technically old enough to be growing up with the Mega Man and Megaman X video game series. These should have been my childhood fandoms. But my family was poor, so I didn’t get that chance. Only in my 20s did I have enough money to start buying up and playing all these games that I’d missed out on before. And now that the internet is as robust as it is, I even get to observe the fandoms and contribute a little bit. 

And these fandoms have taught me things - an adult, in both in my 20s and now in my 30s - about myself. Even things like the ZeroX ship, which some people have dismissed as a rotten ship full of delusional fujoshis. And which some fans insist could only be romantic, and that the people who think it’s platonic are delusional. Considering it pairs the two main characters, I’m not surprised it can be so polarizing. It’s important to me because I can appreciate it either way. Because whether you think their love is romantic or platonic, X and Zero LOVE each other. These are two war heroes who have saved the world multiple times, and the most important thing to them is each other. I can’t overemphasize how much that means to me, and the influence it’s had on my own life, and my own priorities. X taught me the importance of still valuing what good there is in the world, and try not to get cynical or give up. That it’s your friends and the people you love that get you through the shit you didn’t think you’d make it through, and that having that kind of support is a beautiful and valuable thing. And while these were mostly dumb fandom memes, Bisexual Zero memes were what made me realize I WAS BI, and that long hair and titties are fucking metal as hell. Yeah it’s kind of funny to put it like that, but developing this understanding of myself hasn’t stopped here. And appreciating yourself for being a bisexual badass with long hair and boobs is a lot easier when you have a ‘role model’ of sorts. That’s just how it is. And I learned all this while having fun in my free time after work.

So I don’t want to hear any “ew why is an adult like you still into children’s cartoons and video games” bullshit. Questions like that don’t have a good-faith approach to something as harmless as having fucking fun, and tries to imply the answer is some kind of failure or inadequacy on my part. Or worse, frame me as a predator stalking minors, despite me REPEATEDLY emphasizing how older fans have a greater responsibility to do no harm in group spaces, and be gentle and respectful around younger people. So you want to know WHY I’m still playing in these sandboxes? Because I didn’t get a chance to experience them as a kid. Because they still teach me things about myself, and about life. Because they help me accept and value myself. Because that’s what good media does - it teaches you things while you have fun. And I don’t intend to stop learning things OR having fun at any birthday mark. And honestly, expecting people to stop consuming all-ages-appropriate media is just... immature. All that “it shouldn’t have taken you a fujoshi ship for a childrens’ video game series to learn you were bi” can honestly take a hike?? Why do you care where I learned it first, if I’m still out here developing my knowledge and understanding even well outside that framework, reading and learning the same things as you now? If you’re just trying to be elitist then I can’t stop you, but it’s pathetic.

I might even post this publicly someday, fuck

[gavinbowman]

With the Switch arriving, I’ve been trying to clear out some of my in-progress games to make room for zelda. And also because it sucks when you’ve been playing a few different things and taken an extended break and feel kind of detached from them. I didn’t want to abandon them or leave them hanging for months. So here’s a round up of my recent plays.

Fire Emblem Heroes - iOS Played all the current content, countless hours

This was a good one for me when I was waiting around for baby stuff, I could pay attention to other things and even play one handed. I’m conflicted on it, because I had a lot of fun with it, it didn’t cost me anything, and yet I find myself at the end wishing I’d bought Fire Emblem Fates for the 3DS and played that instead. But a lot of the time I spent playing this I probably didn’t have my 3DS handy, so it’s probably moot.

This is a F2P game, but it’s crazy generous. There’s a lot of content to play through, and you get a lot of free premium currency just for playing each day and for completing the content and the various quests. The main use for the premium currency is the gatcha “spins” to get new characters. 4 and 5 star characters have additional moves and skills that are helpful when you get to the higher end content, and you have to get lucky with a summoning to get them. There is a path to upgrade lower level characters, but it requires a lot of a very scarce currency.

I would have liked to have been able to buy a round of character summons for a reasonable fee... that probably would have wound up costing me a lot though. As it is, it costs about $13 for a set. And you can get a set most days you play if you’re playing the earlier content and charging through it at a fair clip. It gets much harder to save up for a set of characters towards the end, the challenge gets higher faster than your characters level up, and you tend to get stuck with a fixed roster of valid characters because leveling up a second set to the point where they’re useful is a big time investment.

There’s two areas where I really enjoyed the game the most. Leveling from 1->20ish, either in missions while I had them available, or in the duels or training rooms. You gain skills and your character grows regularly, it’s a rewarding time. The second was in the high level maps, either the main story or bonus/special content. It was fun trying to find a way to beat the scenario with what I had. And it wasn’t possible to just grind up a couple of levels and stomp all over it, and it wasn’t trivial to try to bring in a ringer who would be better suited to the map. That was some fun stuff.

Although I’m done with the game, I’m not really done with it, I’m still playing the various challenge stuff and popping in for rewards, I’m still excited when I get saved up for a round of summons... but it’s definitely on the down low unless there’s a significant amount of new content. I’m excited to see how the new inherit ability feature works in the coming update, I imagine it’ll require some scarce currencies, for fear of being over used, but it could definitely open up new strategies and options.

Super Mario Run - iOS Finished main game to purple level and bonus levels

This was a fun one for me. It was great having a one handed mario game, great having mario on my phone, and I liked the game plenty. Sure, it’s not as good as a full mario game. And I could see why some people would complain about the amount of content available. If you don’t make any effort to play for the coin challenges, you’d probably blitz through it in 1-2 hours.

I played a bit of the toad rally thing early on so I could unlock the extra characters. It was sort of fun, but it definitely lacked something and the economy was all over the place. I’m sure it was the beginnings of a f2p concept that just didn’t come together or got shifted over to a premium feature early on. Although rally tickets are kind of scarce to begin with, once you play a little bit, they become too plentiful if anything, I usually had the maximum amount, and had bonuses in my kingdom that would more than restock any amount I could use. I think they rebalanced it,  but early on I felt like the amount of toads you’d lose when you lost was way too high, it was hard for me to build up a little stockpile of any without grinding on similar levels I knew well enough to win most of the time.

Anyway, was good fun for what it was, I have no regrets about buying it or spending time playing it. I’m not doing the black coin challenges though, those feel way too much like work.

Mighty Switch Force - 3DS Finished main story & bonus levels - ~7hrs

I kinda fucking hate this game. Bear with me. It’s good, I had fun with it. But fuck, my lasting association with it is not pleasant. It’s one of those games where the initial impression is really strong, and the core mechanics feel great and are interesting, but as you progress through the game it goes in a direction that just makes each level progressively less fun. The fun chunky run and jump and shooty stuff gives way to levels that feel more like puzzle based versions of donkey kong country barrel sequences. It’s still kind of fun for the most part, but there’s a lot of stuff where you’re just killed and then have to remember the sequence next time... it just doesn’t feel as fun as the early levels promised. It’s mostly still okay though, because the levels are maybe 3-5 minutes long (target times, not counting multiple retries and longer times to grok the lay of the level at first), and if they’re big levels, there’s a lot of boosty things to cover large distances quickly. And then you get to the last level. And then it goes from fun shooty platformer that gradually changed into less fun puzzle and timing based platformer, into full on rhythm action puzzle platformer. And the level length increases. And the difficulty increases. So you’re stuck playing with this new mechanic in the hardest and longest level of the game. It left a really bad taste for me anyway. After I finished it, I played the first of the bonus levels, and it was like the early levels, so that left me feeling a bit better about it. And then I played the 2nd one and it moved significantly towards the puzzle things I hadn’t really enjoyed. And yeah, the 5 bonus levels basically play like a greatest hits accelerated evolution of the game mechanics from fun -> fuck you. So yeah, I kept playing the bonus levels so I could hopefully leave the game with a more positive impression, but instead they made me relive the whole journey of gradual disapproval all over again in a condensed way. 

The ironic thing is, I can totally imagine being in the design meetings that made the game this way and totally approving of all the choices, because they increase the depth and variety and force the player’s mastery, and therefore presumably sense of achievement, to improve to progress, and yet here I am hating it all. Was interesting for me anyway. The main thing I’d definitely change is the rhythm action bit on the last level. I get why it feels good and import though. Maybe put it on a shorter level. Or increase health drops, or just save it for a post game challenge room kinda deal or something. Even if the bonus level version of the rhythm mechanic was the final level, I’d have been less down on it, because it’s a shorter level. It’s still hard and frustrating, but in a more manageable quantity. Anyway. Good game. I kinda hate it.

Megaman X - SNES via Wii U VC Finished main story ~12hrs

Really bummed that I had to take a break from this at the point where I did, I was some random distance into sigma’s fortress when I stopped and I forgot what all the weapons and upgrades did by the time I started back.

I was playing this to get a good sense of where things went in this franchise, I really enjoyed Megaman 2 recently, and this felt like the obvious one to play next. I love most of the changes and evolutions. The bigger spaces worked out nice. I don’t know if the slowdown is all just preserved from the original, but damn, that was intense.

Main differences I noticed, side upgrades were handed out as more of a big deal, rather than just a random bonus after some of the levels. There were more permanent upgrades. The main upgrades from the bosses were a lot more effectively balanced. There was way more of a sense of an order to the boss fights, I bounced out of 3 or 4 before I actually managed to complete one and start to make progress. I liked that. Mid level checkpoints were less well placed than the NES game. There were a few places where I could have really done with not having to play some stupid challenging section again before the next stupid challenging section. I confess I used save states to make it though this game. I doubt I could have done it today otherwise, not without a major time investment. At that point I’d probably have been better off watching a speed run on youtube.

Oh, and I really liked the way the energy tank mechanic worked here, once I realized how to use it. It’s basically like finding zelda bottles, except they automatically fill up when you collect excess energy, and they don’t kick in automatically when you’re about to die, you have to watch your energy and use them yourself. I thought it was great.

I guess “now fight all the bosses again” is an established megaman trope... and I actually was okay with how it was implemented here. Checkpoints were a bit more frequent than I remember from megaman 2, and the bosses were spread out over a few tiny levels rather than just all packed into a room.

The final boss was very challenging, again I doubt I could have made it through this game today without save states, at least not with any hair still intact and without it consuming my life for months on end.

My ideal Megaman so far would definitely fall somewhere between this and the NES versions... but after having to drop this mid-way, I’d probably have to play both again to settle on exactly where.

Land’s End - Gear VR Played story mode - Maybe 1hr actual game time? Hard to say because of all the time I spent updating my android phone, or charging it, or waiting for it to cool down enough so I could keep playing, or taking a break because my head hurt. Even if it was around or under 1hr, it was enough.

I’ve been trying to play this one for ages. Since the Gear VR was the only VR headset in the house. It’s probably fair to say that I’ve had a samsung phone and a headset sitting on or around my desk for over a year because I wanted to play this.

And it’s fun, I liked it a lot. It’s a shame it hasn’t been reworked for higher end headsets... but I can understand why it hasn’t. It’s fully designed around gazing, there’s no other inputs, so once you put it on a higher end device with more complex input systems, it’s going to feel a bit restrictive. It’s not like it wouldn’t still be fun, but you’d have that weird feeling of having a controller or hands of some kind that don’t do anything.

But it looks lovely, and it’s a shame that experiencing it on the Gear VR with it’s low res screen and no head tracking etc is the only way to enjoy it. The puzzles are fun, if it’s not pushing the limits of the device it looks like it should be (great design, it’s low poly and low detail and it really nails the aesthetic). There’s a great sense of space and discovery as the levels open up around you, or when you enter some space that you didn’t see a few steps earlier and there’s a whole new room or area.

It’s very short. But that’s good. You get to enjoy something wonderful, but you don’t have to spend a lot of time using the Gear VR to do it. I need to spend more time playing VR games this year. I bought the PSVR specifically with the hope of doing that, but it hasn’t panned out so much so far. I really want to play more of Eagle Flight, I love what I’ve played so far.

Anyway, that’s me all caught up. Sorry to spam 5 games into one post, I’m not sure I even played 5 games last year... but I’m hoping this will free me up to play more zelda and start some new stuff.