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I was excited when Nintendo released the first special edition of a NES game for their online service, letting you play The Legend of Zelda from the start with a bunch of rupees and items. It was an acknowledgment that these classic titles have in fact aged and working to make them more approachable for a wider segment of modern audiences. That’s really cool! (Though of course it would have been even cooler to have a Game Genie or other mechanism for more cheats.)
But ever since then, all the special editions have focused on skipping content instead of making it more approachable. The worst is the one for Dr. Mario, which just puts you right before winning so you can watch a cinematic that you could just as easily watch on YouTube.
This feels like a really disappointing waste of potential. The special editions could make these classic and historically-interesting games more appealing to play by removing outdated punishment - even an infinite lives cheat would go a long way for many of these titles. I don’t understand who is served by SP editions that just skip most of the game.
I feel like there are two fundamentally different ways to play The Sims:
As an ant farm. You load it up with a bunch of people with varying personalities and goals and then watch them live their lives and bounce off each other.
As a dollhouse. You focus on specific individuals and families and have an idea of who they are and what their life should be like so you decide most or all of what they do.
These two approaches are contradictory because they require different levels of control over the game. Just as you might occasionally tap the glass of an actual ant farm or drop in some cookie crumbs or something to see how the ants react, an ant-farming Sims player might order one of their Sims to flirt with or insult someone to create some drama and keep things interesting. But by and large, this player wants their Sims to make autonomous decisions so the simulation keeps running.
Meanwhile, in actual dollhouses, nothing happens unless the person playing with the dolls says it happens. Similarly, dollhousing Sims players want complete control over their Sims so they can create exactly the story they’re trying to create. These players disable Sims’ autonomy (called “free will” in earlier Sims games) so that Sims don’t make out-of-character decisions.
Now, I have to admit that I’m only inferring the existence of ant-farming players based on design decisions in more recent Sims games. I’m very much a dollhouser, I’ve never talked to an ant-farmer, and it didn’t even occur to me that they’d exist until I was trying to understand some of the changes that came in The Sims 3 and 4. But if they don’t exist, then a lot of those changes are completely baffling.
For the completionists among us, trophy/achievement lists and other in-game checklists are basically the steps of a bizarre ritual to escape a curse.
It’s like, “Oh, you wish to be free of the grip of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate? First, you must clear all 615 spaces in adventure mode, collect all 1302 unique spirits, and defeat all 124 challenges! Only then will you release its hold over your mind!”
Just eighteen challenges to go until I can move on to Marvel’s Spider-Man…
Jamie Madigan points out that while games are mostly great at providing performance feedback, they almost totally fail in providing coaching. This is a really hard problem since suggesting process improvements requires expertise and insight, as illustrated in the example of WoWAnalyzer, a tool for coaching World of Warcraft players that required a ton of work to put together.
A conversational game about first contact with an alien race and the ramifications for humanity’s chances of survival. Play control rotates between a few humans and even the alien, and each has their own goals to accomplish mainly through dialog choices. The game is a semi-sequel to Subsurface Circular with a similar format and apparently set in the same world, but they stand separately and can be played in any order. They have slightly different strengths and weaknesses, but a lot of this review will be familiar if you’ve read the previous one.
A 3D collectathon platformer where the player character happens to be a car. The simple gameplay and story, vaporwave-like visuals, and relaxed soundtrack suggest the game is intended to be a chill experience, but lack of polish and backtracking-heavy design make it increasingly frustrating as the map opens up.
A car-based platformer is something I’ve wanted ever since Jim Sterling asked why 3D Sonic games didn’t use driving controls in 2011, but Car Quest doesn’t take full advantage of the premise. While some areas and challenges are built to make use of a car’s movement style (ramps that you must drive up to reach midair collectibles, a slalom that must be completed quickly) much of the game feels like a generic platformer (you can even swim for some reason) and challenges like pushing blocks don’t fit well with the car.
Oh no! You just found out that somebody likes a thing you don’t like. What do you do?
If your answer is “keep my mouth shut so they can keep enjoying the thing even though I know it’s trash,” then I congratulate you for at least mastering the first step of basic civility. But there’s another step beyond that one: open-mindedness. It’s recognizing that you almost certainly don’t know that the thing is trash. It’s genuinely seeking to understand what it is that people enjoy about the thing. And if you master this step too, your life can be much richer.
I’m going to explain why this is the case, but first I need to talk about kitsch for a minute - after all, “kitsch” is practically shorthand for “art only liked by people with worse taste than me.”
A character-driven narrative mystery game with occasional platform/rhythm/adventure game elements. Play as Mae, twenty-year-old college dropout returning to her hometown of Possum Springs and reuniting with her family and friends and confronting how things have changed. Gameplay is mostly a matter of exploring the town, talking to inhabitants and passers-through, and deciding which friend to spend the evening with on each day.
A sports minigame collection set in an island resort. Activities range widely from table hockey to skydiving to playing a glass harp, connected by a surprisingly rich hub world to explore and featuring a surprising amount of customization in the form of outfits, vehicle skins, a variety of dogs that can follow you around, and a villa for the player to lay out and furnish.
