So, The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog was pretty good. But playing it also awoke my long-dormant Sonic fixation and made me want to spend more time with those characters.

The problem is that as a rule, Sonic games are not the kind of game I want to play these days. They tend to be built around mastery challenges, which was great for me when I was learning perseverance but not so much now at a time when I’m uninterested in friction and failure. I just want to chill with Sonic and friends, but Sonic games have no chill. (Yes, there was one RPG, but it was terrible.)

But! It just so happens that the latest mainline Sonic game, Sonic Frontiers, is an open-world game apparently taking some cues from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It has tons of chill!

So I picked it up and am loving it. I’d expect it to be divisive - games that branch out from the formula in crazy experimental ways are normal for the Sonic franchise, but this feels like a more radical departure than usual. And it certainly has flaws, as expected for the first installment with a new structure and gameplay approach, but it hits me in just the right way for what I’m looking for. Some reviewers call the open world empty and desolate; I find it peaceful and calm. Some complain that the platforming segments are isolated and decontextualized; I like that I can approach them on my own pace and schedule. Some complain that the most-traditional elements of the game, the cyber space levels, are so short; I like that they are so manageable and I can generally achieve all of their objectives after just a few tries and then switch to whatever other kind of gameplay I’m in the mood for.

I think this is yet another reason why it’s borderline meaningless to try to assign review scores to games as though their quality and enjoyability are objectively quantifiable, instead of just clarifying what kind of experience they provide. Frontiers is not an objectively great game, but it’s great to me, today. If I’d tried it some years back or even when I was just in the wrong mood maybe I would have dropped it quickly.

What games did I correctly dismiss years ago that I’d actually really enjoy today?

Here’s what frustrates me about the discourse around NFTs in games: it’s not actually about NFTs.

We’ve already had, for a long time, digital marketplaces for artificially-scarce virtual goods. There are many games where players can buy, sell, and trade their in-game goods, but to prevent counterfeiting and fraud the players need to go through a central server to do so. If the server is down or inaccessible you can’t do any of this, and if there’s real money involved the publisher-or-whoever takes a cut to pay for that server. Moving a system like this to an NFT-backed one would allow players to trade directly with each other regardless of central server availability and without needing to subsidize its maintenance.

This was a decently-well-known possibility for years, but no big publisher implemented it, because while it would have improved the player experience, it would have cut off a revenue stream. Taking a cut of every transaction pays far more than just the associated maintenance costs and can actually be the main way these games make money. No publisher is going to just give that away.

So when NFTs did catch on with publishers, it wasn’t for valid and player-friendly use cases in games where it made sense. It was for illegitimate cash-grab bullshit forced into games where it didn’t fit at all, or as the basis of a scam or pyramid scheme. And when those started getting big is when most people first heard the term “NFT”, and so it’s what they associate it with.

Players rightly deride these schemes, but this derision is now associated with terms like “NFT” and “blockchain” because the bad use cases are the only ones most people have encountered. So now if a game comes along with a good NFT use case (such as a digital trading card game that uses NFTs to make cards into unique and distinct entities that can be upgraded, traded, and sold player-to-player), it has an uphill battle because for most players it will be lumped in with the bad use cases and dismissed as just another scummy NFT game.

The problem was never the NFTs. The problem was the short-sighted player-hostile money-grabbing. But since that’s how a lot of people were introduced to NFTs, the conceptual well was poisoned. Once it gets in that state, the problem is self-reinforcing, because player-friendly publishers will mostly want to avoid tarnishing their games with this reputation, while player-hostile ones with nothing to lose will keep pushing for the player-hostile revenue streams.

I never owned an Xbox. But for several years I maintained a list of games I wanted to try if I ever got one. The list grew and shrank over time as new interesting games came and eventually got ported to other platforms, but for basically its entire lifetime the list’s top game was I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MBIES 1N IT!!!1

Released in 2009, Z0MBIES was a quirky and bite-sized twin-stick shooter (at a time when I was very into those). The game was small and mechanically simple, but this was the start of the indie games boom and the game was downloadable for a single dollar. Plus it had a personality that catered to what was popular on the internet at the time, with an irreverent and self-referential soundtrack, references to other popular games, and of course a leetspeak title. It was one of the most successful indie console games of 2009, and though it wasn’t enough to persuade me to buy a Microsoft console when I already had Sony and Nintendo ones plus a gaming PC, I always wanted to try it and be part of the moment.

The game isn’t talked about much anymore, but I recently found out that in 2021, it was ported to Steam. This would make me happy on grounds of games preservation and art history regardless, not to mention the generosity of releasing the game for free–but I was also just really excited that I was finally going to be able to play this game. I could hardly believe it.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been into arcadey twin-stick shooters. My gaming in general has slowed down considerably and I’m particularly uninterested in chasing high scores. But I was so happy to install this game onto my Steam Deck and finally give it a whirl. For a few minutes there, it was 2009 again. A very different time in the life of the games industry, and in mine.

I still don’t plan to buy an Xbox. But I guess I can finally take this game off the list.

Based on how much joy they brought me, not on objective greatness.

1. Kirby and the Forgotten Land
2. Vampire Survivors (which according to my Steam Replay accounted for fully 50% of my Steam play time this year)
3. Star Trek Prodigy: Supernova
4. Shadows Over Loathing
5. The Last Campfire

(I spent so much less time playing games this year that I didn’t really have enough to fill out the usual ten.)

Honorable mentions to Inscryption and The Fall as other games I finished and didn’t hate.

Most anticipated game for 2023:

1. Star Trek: Resurgence

Special award for joy that comes less from the game itself and more from the shared daily habit of playing with Allie, plus what the game means and enables:

1. Wordle
2. dordle

Via Kotaku: Right Now Is A Great Time To Jump Into No Man’s Sky

I’ve been trying to figure out what to say about this for a month.

On the one hand, it’s a gratifying surprise that No Man’s Sky’s 4.0 “Waypoint” update seems like it finally deals with the problems I had with the game, and I went ahead and redownloaded it. But it’s also bittersweet, because Shamus Young had the same problems, so my immediate reaction to the news is to wonder what he’d have to say about this—

And then I remember.

I still don’t know what to say. I wrote before that I no longer had heroes in the talking-about-games-online space. Shamus was the closest thing left. I don’t think there was anyone I looked up to more.

I never met Shamus or even managed to have a direct interaction with him, but it’s hard to overstate his influence on me. I’ve been reading his work for something like fifteen years. There’s a reason he’s the first link in my blogroll and I’ve quoted or linked to him several times. I’m going to feel his absence for a long time, and I’m not the only one.

No Man’s Sky is just one game, and though Shamus wrote about it several times it’s not in the top handful of games that are most associated with him. But I can’t help but find it tragicomic that after he revisited the game multiple times and repeatedly found that its core issues weren’t fixed, they finally are and he didn’t live to see it.

You have to find the humor in these things, because otherwise there’s only the darkness.

So, I’ve been reading the Star Trek comics set in the world of the reboot movies. They are surprisingly good.

The sixth volume makes references to the events of the then-recent Star Trek game set in the same world, which surprised me–most Trek comics exist in their own isolated continuities, since mainline Trek continuity is dense with decades of lore by this point. But the reboot movies started with a cleaner slate and thus can have a single continuity between comics, movies, and games (well, there was just the one game, but still). So that’s kind of cool.

But it’s also clearly cross-promotional. If you read the comics and they tease you with references to the game’s events, maybe you’ll get curious and go buy the game. It’s a little blatant, but, well, I enjoyed the comics so much that it actually worked on me. I decided to pick up the game, which I’d previously ignored due to its poor reviews.

Here’s the dumb part: you can’t buy this game anymore. Not new, anyway. It came out in April of 2013 on PS3, Xbox 360, and Windows/Steam. In April of 2016 - just three years later - it was delisted from all platforms, presumably due to license expiration.

I don’t know much about licensing deals, but this really feels like a terrible model in which everybody loses. If I could have bought this on Steam, I would have, since I have a Steam Deck and no portable way to play a PS3/360 game. Instead, I bought a used physical PS3 copy and not a cent of that sale went to the developer, publisher, or IP owner. The cross-promoting comics convinced me to give Paramount money that Paramount actually refuses to take.

This is also a clear argument against digital-only distribution. If the game hadn’t been sold physically, it would now be almost impossible for me to play it at all… at least legally.

Thankfully, the game was sold physically, so I was able to grab it off eBay for ten bucks, and now I am excited to go play this terrible game.

So, okay, Sega is apparently developing films based on two of its classic titles: rhythm game Space Channel 5 and beat ‘em up Comix Zone. Which–okay, cool, whatever; this early it’s impossible to say whether they will be any good. (Though my immediate thought was “Okay, now do Crazy Taxi.")

But here’s what caught my attention: the Space Channel 5 film will apparently “tell the story of a hapless fast-food worker who is recruited by a freedom reporter from the future to save the world from aliens using the one thing that unites all people on the planet: our love of silly viral dances.” If you aren’t familiar with the source material: the game Space Channel 5 stars a future reporter saving the world from aliens through dance. There’s no “hapless fast-food worker” in the mix. That’s new for the film.

To be clear: I’m not trying to pick on this film in particular. This is a really common pattern. The Sonic the Hedgehog games (and comics, and I think mostly the shows) are about Sonic fighting Eggman, while the films are about James Marsden meeting Sonic and helping him fight Eggman. The Transformers cartoons (and comics, and old movies) are about good and evil transforming robots, while the Michael Bay films are about Shia LaBeouf meeting good transforming robots and helping them fight evil transforming robots. And on and on; you get the idea. As part of an attempt to give an adaptation of a niche property more mainstream appeal, the studio adds in what TVTropes calls a “lead you can relate to”. As if the audience can’t understand a fantastical setting unlike modern Earth or relate to any of its characters unless there’s a wholly non-fantastical person along for the ride to comment on how unlike modern Earth this all is (and probably end up playing a key role in saving the day despite being wholly unqualified compared to the setting’s preexisting characters).

(Note that this is unnecessary for the Comix Zone adaptation since that game was already about a normal artist getting sucked into the world of their comic; the movie can just do the same thing there with no problem.)

Now, I have to assume from the sheer number of times this has been done and the unimaginable amount of money involved that the strategy works more than it fails (or at least seems to). But it perplexes me. Of course it feels bizarrely patronizing–the source material didn’t need to have an everyman audience surrogate in order for the audience to know how to understand and react to the premise and setting. The audience just had their own actual reaction.

But beyond that, naively it seems like this sort of move should reduce the overall appeal of the adaptation.

For the existing fans, the new viewpoint character is an extra layer of metaphor distancing them from what they came for. They’re here to enjoy retro-futurist dancers / brightly-colored forest animals / transforming robot battles, not to watch someone else enjoy them. Any time or focus the film spends on the normal everyday person is worse than useless because it takes away from the time or focus spent on what makes this IP what it is and the reasons the fan enjoys it.

So presumably the idea is that having a “more relatable” lead character will gain you more mainstream appeal than it costs you in niche appeal, but like… having a generic protagonist is not a unique selling point, by definition! All it does is make the movie more interchangeable with other movies, and there are so many movies out there–if you’re someone who needs that “relatable” lead, are you even going to choose to watch Space Channel 5 instead of an actually-mainstream film in the first place? Why would you, unless the fantastical setting appealed to you? In which case, do you even need the “relatable” lead?

It doesn’t make sense to me. It really seems like this kind of adaptation just waters down what sets the source material apart; taking away some of the reason to watch it in particular, replacing it with weaker generic appeal that makes it stand out less.

I can see where that’s a good approach if there aren’t many choices available to the audience and you just need to avoid pushing people away and thus remove reasons not to watch your film. But given the options available to modern film audiences, I’d expect you to be better off giving people a clear reason to watch your film by offering something other films do not.

It’s fun to dust off the old Rock Band controllers and pick the game back up.

It’s even more fun to discover that you played so much fake plastic guitar back in the day that you can, even now, jump right back in on Expert.

Things I have done to prep my Steam Deck for playing games:

• Combed my library, especially my evergreen favorites and my high-priority backlog, for compatible games and installed them, including gigantic AAA titles my previous gaming computer wasn’t fancy enough to run.
• Leaned on ProtonDB to find even more compatible games than those verified by Valve and installed those too.
• Bought an SD card to triple my Deck’s storage to hold all these games.
• Installed EmuDeck to expand my library even further.

Games I have actually played on my Steam Deck:

• Vampire Survivors, a tiny three-dollar indie pixel-art game.

Regrets:

• None

(Disclaimer: I don’t play Souls games and I have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about.)

So I have this theory that a big part of why Dark Souls games attract so much “git gud” toxicity is because they actually aren’t that hard.

A common argument for why Souls games don’t need easy modes is because they already have implicit difficulty options and things you can do in-game to make the game harder or easier on yourself. Figuring out which builds are overpowered and how you can increase your self-heal abilities and so forth isn’t as obvious as picking a difficulty option from a menu, but it does integrate better into the game’s world. This fits with these games' trend of relying on atmosphere and obliqueness rather than direct explanations, drawing the player in to learn through exploration and experimentation (though of course in the internet age you can also just check the wiki), and overall provide an experience of encountering somewhat difficult but ultimately conquerable challenges and learning to overcome them. The games are supposed to be about mastery, so they are intended to be masterable.

And, like, that sounds pretty cool, right? It’s not what I look for but I get why these games are well-liked.

But the combined result of these design decisions is that the games look hard when actually they are inscrutable. And I think that naturally encourages a lot of hostile bullshit signaling/gatekeeping that frames the games as especially difficult and the people who can handle them as just better.

For a game (or any skill) that’s actually exceptionally difficult, you generally don’t see top performers saying “git gud.” They’re much more likely to share useful advice, because that advice isn’t enough. Knowing what to do doesn’t take someone all the way if they still need tons of practice and skill to actually pull it off, and in those cases telling people what to do actually makes the top performer look more skilled. It shows that they aren’t threatened by giving other people the tools to get on their level, and also equips those others to understand just how good the expert is since matching their performance is still quite difficult even knowing exactly how to do it in theory.

On the other hand, if there’s just some slightly esoteric information you need and that’s most of the difference between success and failure, the opposite is true. Giving people that info would make them see how easy it is to get on the “expert” level, thus threatening experts' superiority. So if you’re trying to protect that superiority, you’ll guard that info like the password to a secret club.

Because the Souls games are hard to read, somewhat difficult, and quite masterable once you know the secrets, they’re in a sweet spot where “secret club” membership is easy enough to attain that the group is pretty large and thus will have a lot of status-seekers in it, but small enough that there are plenty of non-members to exclude and show off to, who will think the game is hard and that being an expert in it is impressive.

I suspect that if the games were more readable, they wouldn’t have a reputation as being super hard, and status-seekers wouldn’t flock to them the way they do and basically nobody would be telling others to git gud. If for some reason you want that kind of community around your game, make it somewhat hard to play but definitely hard to read.