How much are you willing to give up for your dreams?

 

How far can the human spirit truly take you?

After beating The Silver Case for the first time, I found myself itching for more Suda content. I didn’t know where to go though, I didn’t want something too long, and I didn’t want to continue to Flower Sun and Rain just yet so I was a little stuck on what I wanted to do. I then remembered his first written game, Super Fire Pro Wrestling Special, a wrestling game so infamous in its writing that Suda received numerous death threats over its ending! Now, to be upfront here, I’ve never been that huge on wrestling, especially the video games, so I was sort of hesitant jumping into this, but my curiosity on where Suda began took hold so I found myself booting it up. What I discovered was one of the most insane SNES games I think I’ve ever played.

The story of this game is where Suda takes full control, delivering a journey about an up and coming wrestler going through multiple tournaments in order to eventually become the champion of the world. From the start, it’s pretty generic, you get a trainer, you do some battles, you lose occasionally, typical sports story writing from my experience, but then it suddenly starts to take a turn. Wrestling goes from a simple way to pass the time, to an obsession, a desire, something that takes priority over everything else in your life. A question begins to be asked, “How far are you willing to go to pursue your dream and is it really worth it?” Suddenly you're an alcoholic, you’re abandoning the girl of your dreams in utter despair over not being good enough for her, you forgo grieving your master in order to keep fighting, to keep wrestling until you reach the top no matter how much it kills you. It’s a testament of the human spirit, a journey of how far you’re willing to go for your dreams, and it only gets darker and darker the farther you get. The final chapter is especially haunting, I won’t really go into what happens because it’s easily the biggest appeal of the game, but the ending is one of the more gut wrenching things I’ve ever seen a game do, and it blows my mind that this was released when it was. It was fascinating going through this story mode though, you can really see a lot of Suda’s writing quirks shine here and I could see it as a Kill The Past game if Suda had made it now. Telling a journey about trying to leave your past behind in order to focus on what you have now is pretty typical for that series, so it was incredibly riveting seeing just where that all began.

This is still a wrestling game though, and like other wrestling games, you’ll be spending most of your time in the ring duking it out. Upon first starting Fire Pro, I was rather confused on what the mechanics were. Mashing like you could in other wrestling games just wasn't working here, and I found myself getting destroyed by the first ever opponent, I was so puzzled on how to make progress. I decided to do some research and I discovered that this game focuses less on button combos and more on button timing! Depending on when you press the button during specific actions you’ll end up doing a different move. The trick to winning in this game is learning when to apply each attack in order to successfully drain your opponent’s stamina to be able to pin them down long enough to win. I could feel my skills increase the more I played and won fights, there’s an incredible growth of skill here, and for a good while I felt as if I was getting stronger with the main character, becoming a part of their journey with them!  At the beginning, this is an incredibly fun loop of gauging what an opponent's pattern is, learning how to best approach them, before delivering a move that devastates them and ends the fight in record time. Unfortunately at about the halfway mark matches start to get incredibly tedious. There’s an incredibly simple strategy with future fights that lets you just spam the kick move till the opponent falls down and loses, letting you win fights in less than a minute and it makes the game turn into a repetitive slog. I felt no effort to use anything else because the game rewarded me for just cheesing it, it kinda sucked and it made me wish the AI was better in order to accommodate for it, it holds a good majority of this game back by the end. The only time this didn’t work was the tag team chapter which became more annoying more than anything as it forced you to rely on your partners ai to stop the other opponent from stopping your take down. It sucks because the beginning of the game is fun, it just becomes so tedious and boring by the end I just kept playing to see more of Suda’s writing.

All in all, Fire Pro Wrestling Special is a great wrestling game, a more unique take on the genre sure, but one I ended up enjoying immensely. It felt like a breath of fresh air from the more generic wrestling games out there, and the more deliberate, timed button presses the game focuses on really helped add a lot more skill factor to it. I just wish the campaign accommodated this better. If there was a difficulty increase by the end then I think it’d help a lot, but unfortunately most opponents are the same level of skills it sucks. It was very much worth playing to see just where Suda started though, and I’m very excited to see this writing stay strong in his other works!

Killing the Past Starts Now.

 


“You can understand without understanding.”

There are a few game devs that I look up to, people that inspire me to try and pursue making a game of my own, to put my vision out there for the world to see, Suda 51 stands as one of those game devs, a man who’s work I fell in love with as soon as I touched No More Heroes all those years ago, and a man who has me excitedly looking forward to any upcoming project he’s involved in. Recently, he put out a new game, Romeo is a Dead Man, and my interest in it has been at an all time high. However, Suda loves to acknowledge his other works in his games, maintaining a sort of “Sudaverse” with what he creates, spanning as far back as his first directorial debut, Moonlight Syndrome, which has events still referenced back in his works even now. This led me to want to start a project, a goal to experience as much Suda 51 as I can, a longterm project playing every single game I can possible that he has a big influence on its work, whether it be his most famous games such as No More Heroes, or his more out there stuff such as Fire Pro Wrestling, I want to truly see everything Suda has to offer, and my journey has begun here with The Silver Case. Now, normally I would start with Fire Pro, as that was actually his first ever project, but I’ve recently been in the mood for a visual novel, and The Silver Case specifically is the start of a long term series he works on known as Kill The Past, games linked together by an overlaying theme of, well, moving on from the past. My journey begins now, it’s time to go back to where it began, time to see what makes Suda so great in the first place, and lay the past to rest, facing the future head on. Let’s kill the past!

I suppose if I were to start anywhere with Silver Case, it would be going into its presentation and overall gameplay. Getting into its story is complicated and it’s a matter that I’d rather save for later due to how much it encompasses this game. To get the obvious out of the way, this is the most visually impressive visual novel I’ve ever played. This game oozes style in literally every single corner. The slick UI, the silver aesthetic of text boxes, the way it utilizes multiple windows to showcase different perspectives of each character, it is a visual marvel to witness, and its art style shines in every corner of the game. I was especially drawn to the way the game switched up the art style from time to time, such as black and white color scheme case 3 took on, keeping you visually interested the entire time. I’m fond of the way The Silver Case utilized live action footage at points to push its narrative, it feels crazy unique for a game made in 1999, and there are many moments where if the live action footage wasn't utilized, the impact wouldn’t be as strong. It’s easily the games highlight, and it’s a clever use of the medium, utilizing the idea of being a game to deliver an art style and direction that can only be done in a video game, making the simple action of reading be an exciting endeavor that has you excited to see what the game sends at you next, it’s incredible.

Gameplay wise, The Silver Case is rather strange, and it took me a little to adjust to its rather unintuitive control scheme. Spliced between the more focused reading segments are dedicated investigation segments where you walk around a space, making contact with various objects, and occasionally solving a puzzle here or there to progress. To actually move around these spaces, you have to navigate a compass in the bottom right corner of your screen, with each direction marked by an arrow. The M button is going to be your most used one, this pulls up a D-Pad that allows you to start moving in one of the cardinal directions, feeling rather stiff in its execution because of it. If you want to make contact with something, you have to back out of that, press the C button, and then click what you want to interact with. It’s not as cut and dry as this a lot of times though, you have to actually be facing the object you want to interact with in order to make progress, it feels rather strange, and it took me a good while to get used too, though once it clicked I started to really enjoy it, it was such a unique way to engage with a video game, and it made me fall in love with the game more than I already had at this point. The other 2 buttons are the save one, letting you save the game, and the interact button which lets you utilize different items you have to solve puzzles. It’s not utilized much though, and when the game expected me to by the end, I kinda forgot it existed. In terms of the puzzles themselves, they can feel rather basic, or sometimes annoying, though there’s so little in the game it never really became a problem. THe only notable ones I can think of is the Hit and Blow puzzle at the start, and the two investigation puzzles spaced throughout that require you to search these same looking buildings for an object to progress the plot. These parts sucked, all the buildings look the same, and it becomes incredibly repetitive with how much you have to explore. They were my least favorite parts of the game, and they came at the end of cases, feeling like a rather huge pace killer in the process. At least the final one gives you more backstory for the world though I can’t say that about the 1st investigation puzzle.

Getting into the story of The Silver Case is a rather complicated affair because in typical Suda fashion, a lot of it can be left up to interpretation and there’s aspects that are left unanswered, leaving you to piece together what exactly went down and coming to their own conclusions. I do find The Silver Case to not be as bad with it though, there is a rather basic outline of a plot to follow here, and the depth comes from the thematic elements behind it, and each character's role in the game, I had no trouble piecing the basics at first, and careful though was only needed for the rest, it strikes a good balance of opening up a mystery and giving you just the right amount of answers. In terms of what the plot is, you play as Akira, a rookie assigned to work in the Heinous Crime Unit, a police group tasked with more dangerous crimes such as high profile bombings and serial killers. The structure of the game consists of you tackling various cases, taking down different criminals in each one, and learning more about who exactly you are, and the true nature of your police force in the process. It seems rather unfocused at first, each case is rather disconnected from each other, and it takes a bit for there to be a proper link, but the final case ends up wrapping things up quite well, and I ended up enjoying the more loose structure here anyway, these cases are incredibly intriguing, and I found myself excitedly starting the next one as soon as they unlocked.

Spliced between each case are the Placebo chapters, offering a 2nd perspective on the events of the cases, having you play as Tokio Morishima, a reporter who’s been tasked to look into information on a killer known as Kamui, whose name spreads out throughout the world, being spoken of in a rather revered fashion, garnering groups of supporters. These chapters are a good breath of air between the more intense cases, and the way they utilize the 2nd perspective to introduce more backstory to the events of the game are rather clever. It does take a bit to get to this point though, the first two Placebos just felt like basic recaps of the cases, it was only with the third one and beyond that these Placebo cases started to show their true importance in the game. It didn’t help that these are easily the most repetitive parts of the game, having you do the same basic action in each one in order to progress in them. Not to say the main cases had any riveting gameplay to them, it’s just Placebo gets rather monotonous with it, and it was easily the worst part of them. It isn’t enough to hold back the rest of the game though, and it helps that Morishima is a rather intriguing protagonist, I’m especially fond of the way the game utilizes his perspective to its advantage, having him see himself as this gritty badass detective, while everyone sees him as a young kid way in over his head. By the end of Placebo too, it gets incredibly investing, especially with how it connected to the wider narrative, and Morishima ended up becoming my favorite character in the game because of it.

To get back to the cases themselves, these also don’t start strongly. The prologue case is fine, it’s a decent tutorial, but it’s too short to leave a lasting impression besides the ending, and the first case has a neat twist, but it’s pretty obvious to figure out, and it feels more like setup to the world of The Silver Case then an interesting murder mystery. It’s the 2nd case when the game begins to rapidly pick up, going full nonstop past this point, and is what truly hooked me on what The Silver Case was trying to do. It presents itself as a simple suicide, but turns into therapy  sessions with a kid basically, learning how he’s coped with the trauma of losing a friend to a heart attack. Hearing how he coped with the grief, the way he denies that his friend is dead, and the rather extreme way he learns to put it behind him, it’s heartwrenching and the way it utilized live action footage to showcase his bond with the kid, really made me feel just how depressing the death was, and it really left quite a strong impression on me. The game picks up heavily beyond this point too, just getting better and better the farther you go, till ending in what I consider a masterful twist. Major spoilers beyond this point, you’ve been warned.

I wanted to talk about cases 3 and 4 here, these cases were the ones that stuck out to me the most, and still linger in my mind as I type up this review. Case 3 has you investigate a kidnapping of a company president, trying to figure out the kidnappers motive, and where the president has been taken. It starts as a simple random case, and the kidnapper has an incredible design, but it’s the ending reveal of this case that left me hooked. In your pursuit of who the kidnapper is, you stumble upon a secret file room in the company building, detailing a scandal said company got involved in where they polluted a village’s water supply, thus turning the place into a violent hellscape that ended in the rape and death of a girl. It’s the way this information is revealed that sticks out in my mind, it involves you searching the various files for the information needed without any music accompanying it, leaving you unnerved as you learn the horrible truth, in turn making the reveal of just who exactly the kidnapper was hit all the harder. It felt like a much more personal case because of it, and it’s easily my favorite case in the game, it’s just a gripping mystery from start to finish, and the ending conversation is one that will stick in my mind for years to come, I can’t get enough of it.

Case 4 is when the game truly starts to lean more into the strange, esoteric direction, having you investigate a network of cyber crimes going on in the city. In terms of the tone and direction, it reminded me a lot of Serial Experiments Lain in how it explored how we connect to the internet, the way we can become obsessed and addicted and lose our grip on reality in the process, and a part of me even wonders if the case was inspired my Lain in some fashion, as the anime had released a year prior to the game’s release. It can be rather confusing though, it follows a lot of chatlogs mostly, and you being interrogated into the main crime group in order to track down the leader, but the most pivotal moment of the case to me was when you discover a group of obsessed idol fans hacking into her hidden cameras in order to watch her daily life. The way this information is shown is with you being part of the actual livestream and chat, watching her due to her daily tasks like any of the regular viewers are doing, leaving me incredibly uncomfortable in the process, making me feel as if I had become one of the many obsessed individuals peering into the life of someone that isn’t me. This eventually ends in her suicide too, with an incredibly haunting shot of her jumping off her building, I felt sick at myself for what I had witnessed, and it perfectly puts you in the shoes of people who become so obsessed with the wider web, forgoing everything around them to be fully part of the internet, it’s speculator in execution.

Now, as I mentioned earlier, the game is loosely connected in its narrative, the cases are basically short stories that you follow with the same cast of characters. It left me wondering just how the game would connect to a wider narrative, if it would at all even. It’s the final case that connects each one together, fully putting the pieces in play into the hellhole that you yourself stepped into. Kamui is the main linking thread here, being a name that pops up rather often throughout the game, a serial killer adored by the world for some odd reason. The major twist that connects it all is that you are Kamui, or rather a vessel intended to be Kamui. You see Kamui was a hitman who had the gift of immortality, murdering a bunch of important political figures, and sending said political groups into chaos. This murder spree, which came to be known as the Silver Case, ultimately ends with Kamui’s death, with the government realizing the full potential behind Kamui as a person. Seeing him as a sort of perfect being, the government begins to enact the shelter kids program, a program designed to mindwash a bunch of kids with special traits into becoming Kamui, perfect soldiers for the government to use however they please. You turn out to be one of these children, and it’s why you feel a rather strange connection to Kamui throughout the game. Hell, the very first case has you tracking down a Kamui vessel. This twist turns the entire case around, especially with just how much was involved in the process, and it leaves an incredibly sick feeling in your stomach the more you learn about it, it’s jawdropping. The final segment is you choosing to end this endless cycle, shutting down the machine that turns people into vessels, and ending Kamui’s reign once and for all. It made me reconsider everything that I had been doing in the game beforehand, and it completely changed how I considered the game at this point, it’s incredible, and the way it thematically ties into the idea of killing the past, choosing to let go of Kamui and instead living as your own person, is stellar, it‘s what made me really click with what Suda 51 has envisioned for his projects.

The Silver Case is a fantastic visual novel, easily my favorite out of all the ones I’ve played, and a game that will always linger in my mind now. The way it presents its sick sense of style, the more out there gameplay elements, the gripping story, it all comes together to create a phenomenal package, and I’m glad I gave it the attention it properly deserved. I highly recommend giving it a shot, it’s a great gateway into what Suda can create, and you get one of the most creative games in the medium in the process. I especially recommended checking out the short novel released after the game that ties into some elements, it’s a pretty interesting read, and it serves as a nice bonus case to read after completing the main game. I can’t wait to see what else Suda cooks up, and for now, I think it’s time for me to leave the past behind, and move forward into everything else Suda has created.

Remake Culture and The Issues of Casual Conformity

 Recently, I've been playing through the Half Life 1 remake, Black Mesa, a remake that I didn't really enjoy my time running through, and it's made me reflect a lot on remake culture as a whole. It's a trend I've noticed a lot in the gaming industry, where a lot of classic games will be remade in a new take, aiming to do something different, while attempting to maintain the original idea behind it. Resident Evil is the most prominent of this, it feels like every entry is getting a remake, whether they needed to or not, and it's turned into a game of waiting for the next remake announcement, but we've also gotten other major releases with titles such as Silent Hill 2 and Dead Space. From a casual perspective, these remakes seem like easier ways to branch into a game or series, serving as a better gateway point then digging up the original and dealing with "dated" design, but as someone who's played more games then you'd expect, and has read up more on art and it's intentional design philosophies, I find remakes to be a major plague on the industry, and they feel fundamentally anti art, stripping away what were once unique game mechanics and decisions for more generic and standard gameplay choices in order to appeal to a wider demographic. 

As I mentioned before, I started this thought process with Black Mesa, a fan made remake of Half Life 1, and I find this game exemplifies a lot of my issue with the remake mindset. Reading into it's development had me understand that the developers of Black Mesa wanted to create an easier gateway into the series, a better first entry to play then the original, and I find that philosophy baked into the game design for the worse. Unique enemy encounters have been stripped away for more generic ones, with a real lack of enemy variety, especially by the end. Atmosphere has been stripped away for a more darker, oppressive vibe, instead of the rather lived in workplace the original had. Even Xen isn't safe from this, where instead of being an alien planet that feels utterly hostile to you and your species, it now looks like a UE5 tech demo that trades away all uniqueness in it to be a bog standard alien planet, with the original identity simply lost to time. Leeway can be given here for being a fan work rather then one made by a company, but it still sticks out in how it misses so much of what made the original Half Life such a well regarded classic. It just feels so padded out and more generic as a shooter, I adore the original for it's lack of fear in alienating people, instead setting off to make what it wanted to make from the offset, creating one of the most unique first person shooters out there, a game well regarded as a classic. There's this strange mindset of about how fans can better understand a game's intention and design more then the devs, but Black Mesa kinda proves the opposite, instead showcasing just how fans can miss the mark just as easily, maybe even more, then these original developers, and how just because you're a diehard fan of the work, doesn't mean you know exactly what you're doing (Sonic suffers from this a lot). 

Persona 3 Reload is another rather continuous remake that I feel strips away all love behind the original. It's no secret that the original Persona 3 can be a bit of a tough game to return too. It strips away party control, social links are a lot more harsh in their requirements, and it's a lot more challenging the the more modern Persona Games such as 5. Remake is a game that sets out to "fix" all this, all while losing a lot of love and care behind its original release! To get the big one out the way, the shift to being in full control of your party. The lack of control in your actions were an intentional choice, one done with the idea of making each party member feel like their own character with their own sense of agency and decisions, instead of just being a generic teammate for you to send out to battle and forget about after. It replaces this system with the controversial tactics menu, having you plan out what strategy will better work for the encounter in front of you, instead of directly choosing the right spell to be used. You see a lot of talk about how bad this system is, with how Mitisuri will just spam the same spell over and over as an example, leaving you more crippled then anything, but when you play the game, you'll find that this never actually happens if you properly plan out your tactics options. it was a strange decision to remove control sure, it deviates from the norm heavily and wasn't something RPGs tended to go for at the time, but it gave Persona 3 a sense of identity that let it stick out from the crowd and better challenged your knowledge on enemy types and encounters more then any RPG had before. Reload stripping this away suddenly takes away all the challenge and skill the original release expected from you, now feeling like a more generic RPG that blends in with the other Persona releases that came after. Tartarus being revamped for the worse as well sticks out in my mind, as the removal of the exhaustion system stripped away an important layer of strategy the game employed onto you. It wasn't a perfect system, you could easily circumvent it by the end game, but it was still was an added layer of depth that made you consider just how far you wanted to push a run in the dungeon each night, and Reload could have benefited from better expanding on it and making it a lot more oppressive, that way you're forced to better manage your schedule in order to be better prepared for the eventual boss fight at the end of each month. Social Links were another major aspect of this, as if you weren't careful enough, you were severely punished by the social link being harmed, with you needing to set out and repair it. It could be a little too cruel at points in the game, and it was another system that needed some more touching up, but it really reinforced the importance of bonds and comradery Persona 3 tried to teach into you. Reload once again strips this away to where Social Links are incredibly easy to manage this time, removing all layers of challenge to it, thus taking away another element of planning you had to incorporate before. Even the cutscene quality has taken a hit here, with the Persona awakening being such a prime example of this. The hesitation Makoto has in pulling the trigger, the way it flashes between his sweating face and the gun's barrel, it showcases that primal fear of death and the urge to overcome it and face the future head on, it's a phenomenal intro, and it sticks in your head even near the end of the game for how strong an impact it makes on you. Reload takes away that hesitation and that beautiful hand drawn 2d artwork to be replaced with more generic 3D models, with the lack of hesitation in the gunshot being taken away, which just makes you ask what the point of htis change was? Was it worth losing an intentional aspect of the games theming in order to appeal to a wider market? What did you gain from this, what does this do to improve upon the original, and what purpose does this release aim to do? It loses everything that made the original great, and becomes yet another generic RPG lost in the sea of constant releases that will be forgotten about in the upcoming years. 

Persona 3 Reload losing it's art design is another issue that has plagued this wave of remake culture, and Bluepoint was a company that exemplified this perfectly. The remakes of Demon Souls is another controversial remake due to the lost of intentional art design in it. Demon Souls on PS3 is an incredible looking game, and the bosses and creatures you had to face were some of the coolest designs ever, creating such unique showcases of hostility, and they made you perfectly feel as if you were thrust into a world you didn't belong to. The remake strips away these original designs and instead gives you more generic fantasy enemy designs, one you could mistake from being a crudely made DND campaign, then anything the souls series gives you. You can feel this as early as the tutorial fight, where it's been touched up way too much, to where you can tell it's meant to be the original design, but without any of the wonder and fear put into it. It feels more like a regular encounter in any JRPG then a demon from hell that's the only thing that stands between you and salvation. Why don;t the eyes glow as much, why are the eyes smaller, why are there more spikes on its body, why does it have nipple piercings, what is there to gain from changing up this design so much??? It won't stick in your mind as much, it'll be forgotten about just as easily as any other generic creature, so why would you give up an aspect that the original game is praised for for this, it's horrible. Shadow of the Colossus suffers from this too, it's not nearly as egregious, but the more realistic visuals these remakes make loses so much wonder and discovery the PS2 release set into you, Bluepoint really missed the mark on each of their releases, and it made me dread any project they were announced to be working on. 

Majora's Mask 3D is another one that has stirred up a lot of talk in the gaming sphere, one that I wanna put my fellow hat into the ring. I'm a rather big fan of the original Majora's Mask, its one of my favorite Zelda games so the idea of a remake existing always had me weary. This weariness proved to be true, because upon playing it, it's suddenly nowhere near as challenging or oppressive as the original. Sure, it has a few more quality of life changes such as being able to go to any hour you want with one of your songs instead of set intervals, but quality of life shouldn't be put in place of oppressive and unique game design. I liked the lack of exact time frames chosen in the original because it forced me to better multitask my game and schedule. While I'm waiting for my meetup to occur, I can be spending time running through the fields collecting heart pieces or fulfilling other side quests the game litters throughout. There was a layer of management kept in place with this, where I had to consider if I still had enough time to go out and complete other tasks the game has in place, or if it'd be too much a risk, making me miss out on my allotted meeting time, thus having me reset the day, or sometimes the side quest entirely in order to have another shot at it. It's a change that, from the offset, seems like it would be for the better, but then you start actually thinking about it, you start thinking about the intention behind it, and suddenly it all falls apart, and it has you look out the remake a lot more harshly. 

This stripness of unique mechanics is the biggest issue remakes have nowadays, where they just take away such vital game mechanics that had actual intention behind it in order to better grasp people in, losing what made this original game special. Silent Hill 2 is such a prime example of this, it's one of my most detested remakes for a reason because it takes away everything that made the original fantastic in place for a much worse product made by a company that clearly didn't understand why Silent Hill 2 was as praised as it was. One of the best scenes in the game, the video tape reveal, is sped up in the remake, telling you exactly what was on the tape way faster, instead of the original lingering on James, having you slowly piece together what happened, with the horror and disgust creeping into you just as slowly, trusting the player to put together the pieces yourself instead of spoon feeding you all the information, refusing to let you actually use your thinking in order to place together the story. The voice acting is made worse by the more the casual, generic sounding voices instead of the more out of place, uncanny atmosphere the original gave in order to better illustrate the otherworldly vibe the town brought into others, leaving you more unsure of who James was a person and his hidden motivations behind every action and thought process. Combat is no longer an intentional choice, having you consider if it's worth using your bullets on a fight, or if you need to pull out your melee weapon and time your swings, constantly forcing a choice onto you in each fight, leaving you tense and scared of what to do moving forward. In the remake, every combat encounter can be dealt with in the exact same way, having you shoot the legs once or twice then bashing them with a pipe on the ground. There's no longer any intention or weight behind any of these encounters, instead having every combat boil to the same strategy without any challenge being left intact. It wants to be more cinematic too, boss fights are a lot more intense and feel more like an action encounter instead of these terrifying, oppressive foes that represent our characters darkest desires and worst fears.  Take the final boss for example, it was set on a foggy rooftop, with a quiet atmosphere, and an oppressive feeling lingering in the air, it felt like a perfect culmination of everything that the game had been building up to at this point, and was the perfect finale to an incredible game. In the remake, you're now in the dark, rain pouring down on you, with loud, intense music, as the boss goes through multiple phase changes, destroying the floor around you and feeling like a climatic finale to a Marvel movie then anything unique that Silent Hill 2 actually wanted to do. 

I find these issues can even plague what are considered good remakes, good video games, and ruin any kind of enjoyment I can feel from these releases. Resident Evil 2 remake is such a prime example of this, it's a game that I can enjoy casually, I can engage with it, I can see what it sets out to do, but then I compare it to what it's directly remaking and I can suddenly see the loss of what made it so great in the first place. Resource management is still here, but it feels like less of a focus here, and while the original could lack it in some areas, it never felt as bad as it was in this remake. Gone are the fixed camera angle, gone are the tank controls instead you have standard third person action gameplay, it feels like such a loss from what made me adore survival horror so much in the first place, and I think it opting for this more generic gameplay makes it stick out way less from the originality and love the PS1 release gave me. The campaigns aren't even that unique anymore, you used to be able to make choices in the other campigan that affected the other, but not even that managed to stay here, they both feel so sameish and boring, it just sucks. I tend to stay out of fandom culture a lot nowdays, it's an utterly toxic wasteland that is better off dead then thriving, but in doing research for this topic, I delved into the a few fanbases for these remakes to see how people felt and why they enjoyed them, and I began to realize it's because no one really wants to respect games as art. There's this refusal to engage with older games because their intentional design is seen as too dated or a product of the time, instead of being purposely made. People no longer want to be challenged, people no longer want to be faced with more out there control schemes are design decisions, they instead want to play something more standard, more comfortable, then anything actually special or unique. It doesn't help that Capcom views these remakes as replacements for the original, with companies such as GOG having to fight tooth and nail to get the original releases on modern storefronts, viewing it as pointless when they can just play the remake instead, no matter how generic and standard that remake actually is. It feels as if art is no longer as beloved, no longer as respected, and instead are viewed as something to consume, to view as just entertainment and nothing else, when the beauty of art was how it never needed to worry about conforming to anyone, how it could stand on its own as its own unique product without worrying of alienating others. The best art for me is ones that are not afraid to challenge you, art that isn't scared to isolate others, instead opting to do what it wants to do instead of needing worldwide mass appeal.

Despite my utter hatred for remake culture as a whole nowadays, I can ultimately see some merit in remakes as a whole. I think a remake works best when it takes what was originally a good idea that just failed to meet it's potential, whether due to lack of time or experience, and fully capitalizes on it to create the proper vision of what the game should have been, instead of a rather lackluster product. There's nothing more frustrating in art then seeing the potential an idea has, but ultimately failing to meet said potential due to a wide variety of factors, external or internal. The problem is, no one else seems to view it this way, and we just get constant remakes of art that was already acclaimed as incredible before, making me ask the question what the point was. Take the recent Resident Evil 4 Remake for an example, a pretty fun game all things considered, and one of the better remakes out there, but also one that feels like it has 0 point to exist. The original release is regarded as one of the greatest games of all time, and is readily available on every modern platform at an affordable price that can run on about anything, so what does the remake serve to do? What reason does it have to exist, why does it need to be here, why were resources being used to work on this when it could have been used on ideas that are much more deserving of a 2nd run through such as Code Veronica or 0. It baffles me so much, even in ones I enjoy, in remakes such as Resident Evil 4, or Dead Space, what do these remakes do to actually justify their existence? I find myself debating over this question time and time again, and I always come to the conclusion that they don't do anything to justify that purpose, that they just feel like a waste of effort of resources that could have been better spent on other projects. Sometimes this mindset can lead to a much worse release too, Resident Evil 3 remake is such a drastic decrease in quality from the original release, it makes you wonder why they bothered to remake it at all instead of just making a whole new game or re-releasing the original. 

I hate the modern remake landscape, and I hate that so much discussion boils down to just "both are great what's there to complain about?" It strips away all nuance in the conversation and ignores any intentionally, any deliberate game design choices in the original releases that remakes can utterly fail to lose. People don't want more alien concepts, more oppressive game design, more challenging works of art, they want bog standard products to consume and talk about instead of actually engaging with what they are given. it's frustrating to witness as someone who adores art as much as I do, and it makes me worry more and more about what the future has in store for art as a whole. Art deserves to be respected, it shouldn't be remade into a worse version of itself, it shouldn't be stripped of all that made it unique, it should be treasured as it is, and I'm tired of standing on the sidelines and seeing this respect lower more and more as more days pass by. We have to do better, we have to have better expectations, we have to fight harder, because if this keeps going the way it is, we may lose all uniqueness art contains, instead having everything become a sludge of conformity and standardization, no love left inside, but instead creating products that are meant to be consumed with no real thought behind it. Even if it's something as simple as writing a blog post on how I feel, I'll do all I can to fight for better respect for art, and I implore you to come join me. Remake culture is a stain on art as a whole, and unless something is drastically changed within it, I see no place for it, and find it better off buried and dead in the ground. 

Rabbids Mayhem at its Finest!!!

 


A Hidden Wii Classic!

I’m a little fond of the Rabbids, they aren’t my favorite little creatures ever, but I always felt like the hate for them was rather overblown. I understand that they phased out Rayman for a good while, and yea that does suck, but most of the games these little dudes had were actually pretty fun, and I spent a good deal of my childhood replaying the 1st two games over and over again. One of the Rabbid games I always wanted to play but never really had the chance to was Rabbids Go Home, a game that I saw advertisements for like crazy when I was growing up, but never really had the chance to pick it up and try it myself. Well, that time has finally come, and I set out to do everything I possibly could in this game, desperate to satisfy that child that lives deep inside me, curious to see if the game was actually good. To just be fully upfront, this is easily the best Rabbids game out there, and a hidden gem on the Wii that I enjoyed immensely.

The Rabbids are sick and tired of staying on earth, and decide that the next best option is to head to the moon. It’s so far away though, and they have no means of reaching it, so what’s their solution? To gather as much stuff as they can into a shopping cart in order to make a huge pile to the moon! They set off to the city to accomplish this task, with the hopes of the moon lying above them the entire time. For the Rabbids, this plot is pretty fitting, and I enjoyed the antics that came along with it. It’s simple, sure, but the game loves to raise the stakes of each level, having you collect more and more stuff in more ridiculous ways. It's hilarious at points, and I found myself curious to see just how the Rabbids make more progress. The way humans interact with them is incredible. It’s the first rush of excitement they’ve gotten in years, and the response is to just panic and run in circles as you destroy every single place dear to them, it’s a riot. I think what works a lot too is the Rabbids aren’t pushed too hard here, they’re really funny in this because the game isn’t constantly making them scream as a way of humor, it has actual clever setup in its jokes and situations, it’s refreshing compared to what the other Rabbid games tend to do. The soundtrack is also fantastic here, it’s mainly composed of a lot of license tracks, but it ramps up incredibly well, and it’s just such an earworm, especially the more original tracks, it’s kinda crazy. Shoutouts to Country Roads just randomly being here, that was such a jumpscare what.

Gameplay is simple here, you’ll be placed into a different set piece for each level, and are tasked with collecting as much stuff as possible before reaching the end and collecting a huge item in order to complete the stage. It’s not really too challenging, and levels don’t really overstay their welcome, and the variety in them is pretty great, the game knows how to change each set piece up really well so things stay fresh, and the wide variety of different challenges helps a lot with the game being fun. Sometimes you’ll be carrying a sick patient and hovering in the air with his quarantine bag, other times you’re riding a jet engine at high speeds down an airport hallway, sucking up anything that stands in your way, and you’ll even race against a cow on a country road, as bombs bombard you the entire time, desperate to put a stop to your antics. There’s not really a single bad level here because of it, and it really feels like the devs squeezed as many ideas as they could into this, fully making use of the rather absurd gimmick this game contains. It helps that the cart is a blast to control here, it has just the right amount of speed to keep your adrenaline up, while not being too fast to the point where you’re constantly losing control. Collecting stuff is satisfying too, each game has a high score of 1000 stuff for you to get, and the challenge comes in trying to keep as much stuff as you can in your cart. It can get rather challenging at points too, there’s a ton of tension in trying to not fall off the edge, and a good few levels had me restarting a bunch in order to obtain the perfect run. There’s also a neat customization option in this game where you can design your Rabbid to look like anything you want, and I had a bit of fun making strange creatures to push around in my shopping cart. This is my beautiful transgender daughter Trucy, I love her more than life itself. Special mention to this utterly insane video too where Ubisoft just made Barack Obama, what the hell was that about???

Rabbids Go Home was a welcome surprise, one I didn't expect to enjoy as much as I did, and even now I find myself thinking about replaying a few levels here and there to try and get better times and score. It’s such a crazy premise, but the game manages to do it justice, and every single gimmick here is a blast here to play, it really is nonstop, and it ends right before it could get overwhelming. Kid me really was onto something when she had an interest in this, and I’m just glad I finally got to experience years after getting that curiosity!

Let's Explore the Opean Seas Together!

 

“We are crusin’ open seas, can’t wait for a new venture!”

I grew up heavily with Sonic Rush, it was one of the first DS games I had when I got the system so I used to replay it over and over again, never really growing sick and tired of it. Despite my love for it though, I never really played its sequel, Sonic Rush Adventure. I demoed it like once, but I never got too far in it, and even now that I’m an adult, I still haven’t properly played it. Randomly though, I got hit with the sudden urge to sit down and play through it all, see what I was missing out on as a kid. I wish I had picked this up when I was little, because this is easily the superior game, and I adored my time with it immensely.

Sonic and Tails are busy exploring the open sea one day, when suddenly a terrible storm hits, and they get caught up in the storm, leaving them deserted on an island in the middle of the ocean. There, they are greeted by Marine, a young Australian girl who longs to explore the world and go on adventures. Not knowing what to do, Sonic and Tails decide to help her out, exploring different islands as they try to figure out how to get back home. This eventually puts them in conflict with Captain Whiskers, who wants to obtain some ancient power in order to rule the seas. It’s during this encounter too, that Sonic runs into Blaze again, who informs Sonic that he’s been stranded in her dimension, and he needs to find a way out. Not wasting any time, Sonic and Blaze set off to put a stop to Captain Whiskers, and hopefully find a way for Sonic to get back home in the process. It’s pretty standard Sonic stuff here, though it feels a bit more dragged out this time around due to the sheer amount of cutscenes here. Sonic Rush Adventure is a very talkative game, arguably too talkative at points, and a lot of your time will be spent just reading dialogue that ultimately amounts to stopping the bad guy. Not helped by this is Marine, who is just kinda annoying most of the game. She’s very immature and repeatedly rushes into danger, causing more problems for the group then they should have, so she just feels like a waste of space, I didn’t enjoy her presence much. In terms of the setting here, I really adore Blaze’s dimension. Sonic Rush is fine in terms of its level themes, but it definitely got really generic at points, a lot of levels just felt by the numbers unfortunately. Adventure has a lot more variety in it, and even the more generic places have ideas that spice them up, like giant mushrooms and dinosaurs to fight in Plant Kingdom, or snowboarding segments in the Ice zone. It helps keep the game fresh, and the idea of exploring different islands with their own habitat keeps things from going stale fast, it’s a good structure for the kind of game this is going for!

Sonic and Blaze feel about the same as they do in Rush, same moveset and all so I got no complaints here. The UI has been touched up a bit, and the trick system is more stylish, but it all still feels great to play, and the rush of speed you got in the 1st one here is kept, making things feel fast and frantic constantly. This is helped by the much better level design here, easily the best of the rush games, as it focuses so much more on the speed, and doesn't really stop to slow you down at points. They have some gimmicks that are a bit slower, such as the minecart segments, or the dolphin, but they never last too long, and they feel like a natural part of the level design, unlike Rush’s philosophy of forcing you to stop and due forced enemy encounters or auto scroll segments. Things feel a lot more connected in Rush Adventure, and it leads to much better pacing, stopping you from really getting bored. Bosses are even better here, they still require you to wait for the weak spot to show up, but you can hit them as many times as you like when it’s exposed now, and the fights don’t take nearly as long as they did in Rush, so even when they aren’t that fun, they end before it gets really annoying. The soundtrack is also so much better here, I adore the tracks Rush had, but Adventure steps it up big time, there isn’t a single track here that I hate, and each song is just constantly stuck in my head now, it’s easily one of my favorite soundtracks for the blue blur, and I find myself jamming to it constantly, even as I type out this review.

Rush Adventure isn’t just the standard Sonic levels though, it decides to change a few things up in order to spice up variety. In between levels are the new vehicle segments, replacing the standard map most Sonic games tend to have. You see, before you can hop into a new zone, you first have to discover it in the open sea by charting it on your map and making your way to it. It’s not just a simple chart though, you have to play a vehicle segment while on the way there in order to arrive. There’s 4 total vehicles here too, each fulfilling a different purpose, and each with their own control scheme, so things at least stay fresh with that. In terms of playing the segments, they’re ok, they use the touch screen a lot, and they’re basically one big autoscroller, but they have a good sense of speed to them, and they usually end before they get boring, and the game strikes a good balance between them and the regular zones, so one style doesn't overtake the other. There’s even a variety of secrets hidden on the open sea, like hidden islands that serve as extra levels for you to do. This is also how you get your chaos emeralds this time around. Throughout the map is a jet ski loving pirate known as Johnny who will challenge you to a race. If you manage to beat him, you win a chaos emerald, and these are pretty fun! They can get rather hectic though, and your base Jet Ski won’t really be able to beat him, so you’ll need to upgrade it a few times in order to stand a chance, but I did enjoy doing each one, and the final one was especially tense, basically neck in neck with who’ll get in the emerald, I adored these!

I mentioned the upgrade system earlier, and that’s another new aspect to Rush Adventure. After you clear a level, you’ll be given different amounts of materials based on your ranking, and these materials are used to build the various vehicles you need to travel the sea. If you do good enough, you won’t really need to grind them out much, but if you get more of the lower ranks, you’ll have to replay some of the stages a few times in order to get the materials necessary to progress. At first, I thought this system was annoying, it felt like obvious padding that didn’t really serve much purpose beyond that. As I played the game more and more though, I started to really enjoy this system! The idea of repeating stages normally would scream a bad idea, but for Sonic it works surprisingly well, as these games were always built around you replaying the levels over and over again in order to get better times. The way this system is implemented naturally feeds into that, and I could feel myself getting better at each stage as I tried to get more materials, and by the end I was just getting constant S ranks, it was extremely fun seeing my skills build up more and more!

Rush Adventure really surprised me, I thought I’d come into this not liking it as much as Rush, as I knew this game wasn't as well received as Rush was, but I ended up coming out of it adoring it more! The much better level design, the new variety in gimmicks that still maintain the Sonic design philosophy, the better soundtrack, the better pacing, Sonic Rush Adventure is a fantastic sequel to an already fun DS classic, and I’m mad at kid me for never giving it a shot when I was growing up! It’s one of Sonic’s more underrated adventures, and one that I’m very glad I checked out!

Why I Adore Video Games!

 

A few weeks ago, one of my friends recommenced me this cute little game here, Moss Moss, as something to check out whenever I was free! Well today was the day that I decided to play it, and it was a really enjoyable experience. It only took me 30 minutes or so to do everything, but the way it handled it's secrets and mechanics was pretty neat, and it made em sit back and reflect on how much I really love this era of gaming. I'm not the type to say games were never good, or games are awful now, but I do think nowadays games can seem to be in a pretty bad place. Whether it be micro transactions, generative AI being forced in, huge company layoffs, game breaking bugs, awful live services, it can seem like gaming has never been worse, especially if you just focus on the triple a side of things, but honestly, I think we've never been in a better era for video games! I find Indies are the best example of this, I remember back when I was a little girl the most notable indies were stuff like Super Meat Boy or Braid, not bad games per say, but ones I think were rather standard as platformers, so seeing Indies in the state they are in nowadays has been really sick! There's still the big names of course, stuff like Balatro, or Deltarune and Ultrakill, but then you got the really cool niche stuff, the ones not many will know about, but will be some of the sickest game experiences you'll ever have. I think about the Milk games a lot for example, those are decently popular I feel, but they start to do their own unique thing, with how it explores the mental state of someone suffering from mental illness, and it was an experience that hit me personally, one that I found insanely relatable with everything that has come my way, and one that is personal to me now due to it! There's Zeroranger and Void Stranger, two games that changed my life due to the people I got introduced to due to it, but also insanely sick experiences in their own right, pushing the limits of a video game, and using each respective genre to their fullest! This is why I find the conversation of gaming to be dead or ruined to be so baffling, there's so many awesome little experiences packed away in every single corner now, experiences that you won't get anywhere else, in any kind of genre! It's not even just relegated to storefronts too, you got stuff like this in things such as your web browser (like Moss Moss) or romhacks and fangames, passion projects made for free to just be enjoyed whenever! The way these games can use interactivity to really put you into the experience, to really make you love what you're playing, that interactivity is what makes video games my favorite form of art, there's just so much creative stuff you can do with that aspect, and from the hundreds of games I've played, I've experienced so many world changing moments. I'd argue you can find a lot of these even from before too, with stuff such as Oneshot or OFF, rpg maker games that use that medium and expectations to it's advantage, to take you off guard and surprise you! Games such as Drakengard or Metal Gear Solid, games that use mechanics in a strange way, sometimes even being unfun, for the sake of pushing a narrative, to put you in the role of who you're playing as! If you want the best example of how amazing indie games are nowadays, check out UFO 50, a collection of 50 full sized indies, in so many different genres that use so many cool mechanics. The first one alone, Barbuta, is such an intrinsic and strange experience, it had me making an entire map just to bea tit, I adore stuff like this! I won't argue that there's some bad shit happening in the gaming sphere, but in terms of what's actually being released daily? It's never been better, and I cannot wait to see what keeps coming out next, my over 800 long steam list will never go dry!

God Has Truly Left Us and Bubsy is the Reason Why

Presenting the Bobcat’s worst adventure!

After 3 Bubsy game’s I finally have made it to the final one, the last Bubsy game before his weird return to the modern world. The last bad one as they say since from what I understand the next two are just boring at worst. I feel Bubsy 3D needs no introduction, this game lives in infamy as one of the worst video games of all time, and it made my eventual playthrough of it all the more foreboding. Well, that time is finally here and I can finally see if Bubsy 3D truly deserves the infamy he has. The answer is of course yes, it’s Bubsy. Do you expect him to learn at this point?

The Woolies are back and they wanna kill Bubsy which means you gotta go back and fight them who CARES it’s the same Bubsy plots as the others there’s nothing to talk about here.Now graphically, this game is a mess. Everything looks so bland, so generic, the devs really just put a bunch of random platforms around everywhere and called it level design, it’s horrible! It feels less like a game and more like a failed unity project with how much everything looks cobbled together it really leaves a bad taste in your mouth! The goal of every level is simple, having you try and get to the end, collecting whatever you can along the way and maybe go for the two rocket parts each level has in order to get the good ending, that’s about it. Levels fall into the same problem Bubsy 2 has where the stages are too big and maze-like to navigate properly. They even bring the arrows back here, but they do just as bad a job as the last game, especially with how much more open this game is, just giant plains of nothing with only a few grey platforms scattered around to trick you into thinking this game has actual level design in it. In terms of controls, this game feels rancid. Bubsy is controlled via tank controls here, and while I’m a pretty big fan of tank controls, Bubsy 3D does not feel designed with them in mind at all, he feels way too heavy to properly steer and enemy bullets are a pain to dodge due to the sluggish turning and jump, it never feels fair whenever you get hit in this game. Speaking of the jump, that somehow gets messed up here, since each time you jump the camera decides to suddenly shift down to the GROUND. I get the attention is to help see what’s below you, but in practice it’s disorienting as hell and took me off guard every single time it happened, I never got used to it, and the fact the game expects me to jump on enemies with it made me just run past most foes in my way. There technically is another way to attack, with you being able to throw the atoms you find, this game's coins, at foes, but it’s way too finicky and slow to rely on it, and I just collected them for the bonus round instead.

In a lot of ways, I can’t really blame Bubsy 3D for the way it is. The development of this game was awful, it was a bunch of developers not experienced with 3D technology at all being forced to work with it and try and make something good out of it. They also just had nothing good to reference, Mario 64 wasn't out and 3D platformers were in that weird spot of doing whatever till something clicked. Funny enough, Mario 64 was actually revealed during the development of this game, and I can only imagine the pain on the dev’s faces when that happened. Still though, this doesn't change the fact that this was an utterly miserable game to experience, and I just wanted it to end the second I started it. Little fun fact by the way, the first time I booted this up the controls combined with the horrid graphics gave me such a massive headache that I ended up puking pretty soon after starting it, this game actually harmed me! I would say this is just as bad as the other ones truthfully, but I think this takes the cake as the worst purely due to how much longer it takes to beat it, at least the other ones were short! I;m happy to finally get the worst out of the way, and I’m hoping that I find some enjoyment in the last two Bubsy games, because if they end up being just as bad as this, I’m never going to be able to find peace and happiness again.