Leon's Microblog – March 2020

Personally, though, I think my favourite among these games is "HappyFace", a Minesweeper clone that gradually turns out to be nothing of the sort, all of its gamelike structures disintegrating into meaninglessness, as if a dream.

Additionally there's also an entire "GDC talk" by the creator about the fictional history of Collide Fish, which is by itself about as funny as most of Frog Fractions 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55qQbAGF2zE

The "disenchant" column is what's maligning me… There's really no easy way to specify in the macro name whether you want the link text to disappear or become normal… Ink's use of [square brackets] to specify removed text among the link text has been taunting me for a while…

This game (Anodyne 1)'s dungeons are really just has the key maze and little else, and it feels like there's barely anything left to gain over just making the dungeon strictly linear, doing away with the keys and map and just having the rooms, like an action game.

Dungeons in Zelda 1 and 2 were combat-heavy mazes of attrition, but by LA, the combat angle had faded, leaving just mazes of keys and single-room puzzles, and MAYBE had some showy setpiece room or machine that opened and closed paths.

I want to like the game's barebones Zelda dungeons, which give no new equipment items and use only mechanics that the player's weapon and jump verbs can manipulate… but I feel like these instead illustrate how much of the "Zelda dungeon" formula was just key-collecting busywork.

When I say "audiovisual ideas" from Yume Nikki, I mean stuff like one area having 3-colour graphics, and another area's music track sounding like this: https://htch.bandcamp.com/track/space

God, the Link's Awakening parts and the Yume Nikki parts of this undermine each other so much. LA's strength is its humanity, and YN's strength is alienation. And what's worse is they're so on the nose, often whole sentences from the former and audiovisual ideas from the latter.

Wait… hang on. It's the dog name, isn't it? Damn, I picked the wrong dog name option. Knew I should've gone with "no name". Well ain't that just all.

In this game, it's surprisingly great at enticing you to give one last try (which, like in NetHack, works great with the difficulty) but I feel it's undermined by, yes, the ability to grind for currency. (This is why Shovel Knight's main campaign doesn't let you revisit levels.)

Can't believe they made this textbook sphinx and didn't put in any of the cat parts. Shaking my head. Swinging my face. Wobbling my noggin. Convulsing my cranium. Centrifuging my

Playing Dark Souls has finally made me appreciate the true challenge of Dark Souls…… trying not to lose your damn mind while spending two solid minutes trucking from the save point to a boss battle that you lose in 20 seconds!!

Why did they have to specify that the evil white dragon is an albino?? Why is this trope still in existence?!

Second funniest part of this game is when you toss a prism stone off a lethal fall distance and its impact sounds like a heavily bitcrushed stock sound effect scream.

*finishing chalking up diagrams on a whiteboard* It's very simple. Sen's Fortress is Victory Road, Anor Londo is Pokémon League, the Lord Soul rotters are the Elite Four… Ornstein and Smough are, uh, um, Jessie and James from Pokémon Yellow,

Like, to contrast with Wind Waker specifically, its quest NPCs fit in neatly with its light, fluid tone and art style, whereas Dark Souls's NPCs feel more out-of-place and mysterious as a result.

Thinking of how this has the same kinds of strange/silly main quest NPCs as a typical Zelda (talking sea monster, towering goddess, giant bird, etc) but these feel more special/subversive… I think because the harsh, less grandiose art/music direction sharply contrasts with them.

This game's got a lot of RPG inventory cruft, but I'm glad the flask is more or less the be-all end-all solution for healing. I'm imagining how awful this game would be if you had four or five different levels of "potion" you had to find that took up a slot each, like usual.

The wide variety of boss concepts – ranging from swordfights to more Zelda-like puzzle affairs – is rather nice, even if many of them are veeeeeeery swingy in an unpleasant way. Not even just in favour of the bosses either, with several having awkward safe spots in their attacks.

Thinking about Anor Londo, and how the "mega-city" made entirely of the grandest architecture the setting can allow, enlarged to skyscrapers, is kind of a high sf cliché, such as in MTG's Ravnica (2005) – modern notions of a "city" fitted, via magic or divinity, into the past.

This game (Dark Souls) is NOT very polite at all to Heights Dislikers

Why do Dark Souls rats randomly drop Humanity? Hmm… Makes u think… –– For more gam3r tw1337s, hit the follow button! Here's a "5 minute demo" of what you're missing: –– Time to spend skill points *opens the list to find a 75%-off flash sale on something called "Stength"* Uh oh

I'll admit, I'd thought the area made of roughly-hewn wood bridges and shacks populated by unhygienic humanoids was a little on the nose, but the addition of poison dart blowers is definitely a bit much.

I suspect this sort of excellent pacing trick is one of the reasons people resonate with Undertale's "Despite everything, it's still you", which is a message you see while visiting the second of two parents' homes, each at the (neutral) game's 20% and 80% marks.

Something I actually really like is that the main quest has only two McGuffins (the Bells) to obtain before the endgame, and you obtain them at the game's 20% and 80% marks. A long chasm of time and space between them, that makes the second so much more meaningful than the first.

I can't believe this game (Dark Souls) pulls the same "sacred obstacle course dungeon to test the Chosen One" trope that every game since Zelda II did. It's not good writing!! It's the "a wizard did it" of worldbuilding!!! Wind Waker did it! BotW did it 120 times! 137 with DLC!

Easily the funniest thing in this game so far is seeing enemies whip out and quaff their own healing potions right in the middle of combat, an animation that observes and redeems the inherent dissonant silliness of RPG player-characters mashing heals every two actions.

To me the biggest feature of Metroidvania world structure is how there is initially an obvious hierarchy to the areas – "level 1", "level 2" – but as the game advances, that hierarchy is fogged, with new areas that fit nowhere, as well as earlier areas taking on new roles.

I suspect the zeitgeist is reticent to call Dark Souls a Metroidvania because the major items aren't "powerups" (except the ones that are) and there are no missile tanks – but the world has the same tight-knit weblike structure that marks it as neither open-world nor level-based.

Its other admirable commitment to versimilitude is the much-vaunted Super Metroid-esque lengths it goes in map topology to avoid needing a fast travel mechanic. Though, the real genius move is also offering no in-game map whatsoever, thus making it all seem especially impressive.

I appreciate Dark Souls's commitment to versimilitude by implying that every enemy that respawns is undead, and when you go to rest, they just get back up after you've killed them… even though it breaks that rule several hundred times later on.