Thoughts on Pixel Poppers

Disc Rage Isn't About Discs

2026-07-29T00:00:00+00:00

This is a hot take that deserves a fuller treatment, but:

The outrage about Sony giving up on producing physical discs isn’t about discs. It’s about ownership.

Physical game sales are super low, and PC gaming has been essentially digital only for some time without an uproar. But, like—thanks to sales and bundles, PC games are often available at deep discounts. This is becoming more true for console games but they do lag behind, and so the option to buy used is much more important there: even if you don’t buy physical, the fact that it’s an option puts a cap on what the digital store can charge. And a lot of PC games (especially if bought on GOG) can easily be backed up and played completely offline, whereas it’s not at all unheard of for even single-player games to become unplayable if PSN goes down… unless you have the disc. And of course there have been multiple news items recently about PSN closing digital stores (which isn’t new) and removing content, including from the libraries of people who spent money on it—again, having the physical media prevents this entirely. (Patches notwithstanding.)

The lack of physical media on PC isn’t that big of a deal, because that platform is consumer-friendly enough that you don’t need physical media as a bulwark. But Sony have repeatedly demonstrated consumer hostility, and physical media is an important defense against it. Without physical media, the PSN store becomes a true monopoly (especially for first-party titles since Sony is no longer bringing their games to PC) and consumers are subject to their whims. There will no longer be (legal) ways around their DRM and expired licenses. And rather than passing on the savings, I think we’ll see less discounting of PlayStation games now that they won’t have to compete with the physical and second-hand markets.

That’s why people are mad about Sony ditching discs. Because it’s them consolidating their control, so they can be more monopolistic and consumer-hostile.

When What's Old is Renewed

2026-04-12T10:15:00+02:00

A couple thoughts on bringing old games to new hardware…

In 2006, the Jak and Daxter series got its fifth installment: Daxter. It was the first game in the franchise to be developed by someone other than Naughty Dog (though Ready at Dawn’s founders did include Naughty Dog alumni). It was the series’ first midquel, taking place during the time skip at the beginning of Jak II. It was the series’ first game to be on the PSP instead of the PS2, and it was the first game to star Daxter as the main playable character instead of Jak.

Those last two factors go together. In 2006, handheld games were smaller and lesser than console ones. The limits of technology meant that to gain portability, you had to give up scope and scale and graphical fidelity and even some controls (handhelds always had fewer buttons, and it wasn’t until the Vita in 2011 that a handheld came out with dual analog sticks). The PSP was in some ways perceived as the PS2’s more-compact and less-powerful sidekick, so going from PS2 to PSP was like going from Jak to Daxter, and it made sense to embrace that in the game’s design and premise.

But Daxter outperformed those expectations. I remember seeing multiple reviews saying it wasn’t just good for a handheld game, it was a good game period, and it was proof that handhelds were now capable of delivering console-level experiences. This was a huge deal at the time, and not only was Daxter widely considered one of the PSP’s best games and a system seller (certainly it’s the reason I bought one), it was seen as a worthy entry in the beloved Jak and Daxter franchise.

Time and console generations marched on, and while Jak and Daxter’s PS2-based installments were ported to the PS3, Vita, and PS4/PS5, Daxter was left behind. This didn’t change until 2024, when it (along with the other much less-well-regarded PSP installment The Lost Frontier) got ported to PS4/PS5, making it possible for the first time to play the entire series on the same system.

Obviously I love this from a games preservation perspective, but there’s a kind of bittersweet note to it. If you play through the series for the first time this way, all on the same system, without a nostalgic framing, in an era when there is no longer any real distinction between handheld and console games, Daxter hits in a very different way. It’s no longer a shockingly-strong handheld game that manages to reach up to the lower range of console-level quality; it’s a weak console game that just sits down in that lower range.

It’s hard not to be sad about it. Daxter has aged poorly through no fault of its own and will never again be as enjoyable as when it first came out. It was a revelation that changed what we could expect from handheld games, but the glorious future it pointed to has left it behind and now it’s a footnote in the Jak and Daxter series.

But of course this is because we now live in that glorious future. The tech has grown and the industry has advanced and “good for a handheld game” no longer even makes sense. So it’s hard to be too upset.

In 2005, Sigma Star Saga was released for the GBA. It was a hybrid RPG and space shooter that I found intriguing and certainly eyed a few times at my local GameStop, but middling reviews and my limited budget meant I never actually tried it out, and as the industry and I both moved on from the GBA it was left behind.

There are a lot of games like this, that were on my radar for a long time but that I never actually experienced. Games have a shorter shelf life than less-interactive media; not only does hardware age out and make it difficult or expensive to (legally) play old games, design sensibilities evolve and it becomes unappealing to suffer through outdatedly obtuse or punishing experiences (at least for folks like me who lost patience as we got older).

But then, a few days ago, an enhanced port called Sigma Star Saga DX came out for PC, PS5, and Switch with bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements. Suddenly it’s easy (and legal) to play this game on modern hardware, and its most glaring flaws have been polished away. Suddenly this game is relevant again.

There are a lot of good old games that are essentially trapped on defunct hardware and buried under unapproachable design. A lot of art that’s effectively lost to the ages and to new generations. So when those works get a fresh coat of paint (far less expensive than making entirely new games) and can be introduced to a new audience, I get excited. It’s great when it means I can reexperience a modernized take on a game I loved, and it’s great when it means I can finally experience a game I wondered about for years and eventually gave up on.

So I’m eager to cast an economic vote for this by snapping up this game, and I’m eager to finally play it. More than that: I am stoked. I’m going to play it on my Steam Deck in handheld mode, which I hope will help me stay in the right mindset with the right expectations. But no matter what, I’m glad this game is no longer left behind.

Putting Games in Cultural and Historical Context

2026-02-27T09:27:00+01:00

It’s easy to forget how much game design and marketing is driven by external cultural, technological, and political developments. It’s hard to see the shape of a moment that you’re in the middle of, but looking back can draw things into better focus. Here are two videos that do that in very different ways.

First is “playstation games that might be evil”.

This is a retrospective of some of the odder games from the first couple generations of PlayStation hardware. For people of my age who were gaming during these times, it’s nostalgic but it also recontextualizes things. It’s easy to forget that a lot of things we now take for granted in game design (perhaps most obviously, movement and camera control in 3D games) didn’t start with an obviously-correct convention and had some wide-ranging experimentation for a while, and in hindsight it’s much easier to see the cultural forces behind then-normal-and-now-weird marketing decisions. Video games are such a fast-evolving art form; it’s worth pausing to look back over the path once in a while.

Second is “Kriegsspiel! How Napoleon Accidentally Invented Strategy Games”.

This is a deeply-researched look at the evolution of strategy/war games over centuries of human history. It discusses their origins, purpose, and development, and how they are downstream of cultural and political changes and the ways people think about (and enact) real-life warfare. I’ve only dabbled in these kinds of games, but Weidman frames things clearly enough that I had no trouble following and I gained a new appreciation for how these games fit in to the way civilization has progressed.

These videos have very different vibes, but I find they improve each other. Starting with a look back at an era I lived through helped remind me how these developments feel while they are happening, and remind me that it’s possible to look back at them and understand them more deeply. That made the sweeping historical overview hit harder since I could analogize it to my own experiences and imagine how things felt at the time but also see how our modern perspective gives us a richer understanding. And looking back that far helped me understand that effects like those in the PlayStation video have been going on for as long as humanity has been creating art.

#nostalgia, #history

My Top Games of 2025

2025-12-31T00:00:07-08:00

My Top Five (Non-Incremental) Games I Played in 2025

Other Games From 2025 That Probably Would Have Made the List but I Haven’t Played Them Yet

I was more stressed in 2025 than I have been for a while. Based on historical data, I assume this is why I also played more games this year than I have in a while too. And because of the nature of the stress, I also played a lot of incremental games in particular. I may write some of my thoughts about their design trade-offs later; for now, here are my favorites from the year.

The Best Incremental Games I Played in 2025

#top ten

Incremental Progress

2025-12-31T00:00:06-08:00

They say we seek in our escapism what we miss in our normal life. It’s helpful to keep this in mind when your tastes change and you find yourself drawn to something new, as it can reveal things you didn’t even realize were bothering you, and point to what you most need to fix.

For example…

For me, the start of 2025 was a stressful and unpredictable time. Without getting too into-the-weeds on my personal situation: I was working toward a very important life-changing goal and knew roughly what I needed to do, but it was something I’d never done before and a lot of the particulars were outside my control. There were significant aspects of it where I just had to wait and hope. (Everything has turned out fine so far, by the way, and I am in a much less stressful place now.)

At the same time, I suddenly found myself drawn to incremental games more than ever before. Sometimes also called “idle games” or “clicker games”, these are games where the central mechanic is Number Go Up. Typically, you accumulate a resource by clicking, and then spend that resource on various ways to make Number Go Up faster, such as increasing the amount of resource rewarded by each click or making it so that the resource is also accumulated passively over time. A ton of games have built on this basic formula in a lot of varied and interesting ways, but that’s the heart of the genre.

That means these games are more directly about progress itself than most games (heck, the generally-accepted “first” incremental game is called “Progress Quest”). And that progress is clear (you can see Number and watch how fast it Go Up), player-driven (it’s your own actions or choices that make Number Go Up), and inevitable (there’s some challenge to figuring out the best sequence of actions to make Number Go Up as fast as possible, but as long as you keep doing things Number will Go Up).

In thinking about this, I am reminded of Bennett Foddy’s introduction to Getting Over It, in which he contrasts his game to ones that are “empowering” and “inch you steadily forward”. And while there is definitely a place for games that reject that paradigm, there’s also a place for games that embrace it.

Incremental games helped me avoid feeling powerless at a time when I couldn’t tell if I was moving in the direction I needed to go. I’m grateful for them.

#incremental games

My Top Games of 2024

2024-12-29T00:00:03-08:00

My Game of the Year

Dungeons of Hinterberg

Literally the Only Other 2024 Game I Played This Year

Cat Quest III

Game I Played the Most This Year

Farming Simulator 22, which I still play with Senpai-chan

Games I Returned to This Year

Faerie Solitaire Remastered, which kept me sane in a lot of hour-long work meetings for which I had to be on camera the whole time but only needed to pay attention for a couple of minutes
Orbit, an obscure game for an obscure platform that scratches a specific itch that’s otherwise pretty hard to scratch these days

Game Which I Might Have Bought This Year, Except I Felt Burned on Early Adoption of Indie Titles

Caravan SandWitch, which seemed fun and chill, but after both of the indie games I bought and played around their release had significant updates adding content and polish after I finished playing them, I felt like I was being punished for early adoption and remembered why I often wait to play indie games

#top ten

The Platform is the Playstyle: Going the Distance

2024-12-29T00:00:02-08:00

There’s a subgenre of game where you launch something and it travels a distance based partly on skill and partly on luck, and the further you manage to go the more resources you collect which you can then spend on upgrades that let you go farther and farther. Like Yetisports: Pingu Throw with a progression treadmill, and kind of a precursor to endless runners like Canabalt and its descendants.

I feel like there were a lot of these for a while, but people largely stopped making this kind of game. Maybe the mechanics were a bit too simple, or maybe endless runners were more appealing. But even the games that were made are now mostly lost to time. The problem is that their style of gameplay as well as the era in which they were popular meant they were mostly Flash games, which of course is now a dead platform, or early iOS games, which is an anti-preservation platform. (Or both.)

One of my favorites was Orbit, which came out exclusively as a PlayStation Mini. Like PlayStation Mobile, PlayStation Minis are a now-defunct platform of small digital-only games. These were aimed primarily at the PSP, but also often playable on the PS3 and later the Vita and PlayStation TV. I think the Minis might technically still be purchasable and downloadable if you have the right hardware, but some of them (including Orbit) are long-since delisted.

If you weren’t in the PlayStation ecosystem when Sony was pushing PlayStation Minis, it’s hard to even find evidence they ever existed. Try searching “PlayStation Mini” now and you’ll mostly just find results for the PlayStation Classic instead. So Orbit is even deader than the Flash or early mobile games of its ilk.

These games were pretty popular, but they effectively only existed for a few years and have been all-but wiped from history. Their remembered impact is so minor that I can’t even find an agreed-upon genre name for them (I call them “distance games”).

It’s a shame, because sometimes this sort of mindless progression is just what the doctor ordered, and I feel like it would still be right at home on mobile. Maybe they just don’t monetize as well as gacha bullshit.

#games preservation, #distance games

Genres Are Messy and That's Fine

2024-06-02T08:01:28-07:00

There are two main reasons that game genres are such a mess. The first, which seems to be slightly better known, is that categories are hard. But the second reason, which is both more important and less understood, is this:

A game’s genre label isn’t really about that game. It’s about every other game.

Genre labels are shorthand used for setting expectations. They convey what sort of experience a game provides by invoking a shared reference point. Claiming that a game belongs to a certain genre is a statement that the game is, in important ways, similar to other games in that genre and different from other games outside that genre. Therefore, the most useful genre label for a game depends completely on which other games do and do not have that label.

Suppose Apex Legends had come out in 1994. The exact same game, played the exact same way. It would have been called a “DOOM clone”. That would have been the most useful label at the time. But since it instead came out in 2019, into a world that had seen Team Fortress 2, Overwatch, Battleborn, and so on, it was more useful to call it a “hero shooter”. The only difference was which other games people were familiar with.

The best-known example of someone trying to push this in the other direction is of course Hideo Kojima referring to Death Stranding as the first “strand game” when nobody knows what that means. This completely fails to clarify what kind of experience the game provides. But who knows; maybe in a few years “strand” will be a widely-understood genre label.

It’s expected for the set of commonly-used genre labels and their meanings to shift over time, and for this to accelerate as more games are created more rapidly. And on top of that, the more games come out, the smaller the percentage of them that even the experts can possibly be familiar with.

I don’t really play shmups so it is not particularly useful to me to distinguish between their subtypes. For my purposes, a bullet hell game and a trance shooter game are in the same genre. I literally didn’t even know that “trance shooter” was considered a shmup subtype until I looked it up just now, even though one of the listed examples is Super Stardust HD which is one of my favorites! But of course, to people who care a lot about these particular types of games, the distinctions are significant and having the subgenre labels is quite useful.

Add this all together, and what we have is: genre labels are hard to define, shift over time, and mean different things to different people. This is fine. The goal of a genre label is to compare a game to the constantly-shifting reference points around it; of course it will also be constantly shifting. Trying to “fix” this by getting super-technical and specific with your definition is like trying to plant a flag in the ocean.

(Naturally all this applies to genres in all kinds of media, and a lot of other categories too.)

#game genres

Star Ocean and Non-Person Characters

2024-01-28T15:18:03+00:00

For me, the most important thing an RPG can do is make its setting feel like a real world inhabited by real people. Having recently played Star Ocean: The Divine Force and Star Ocean: The Second Story R back to back has provided me with a couple nicely illustrative examples to share. Minor/vague spoilers follow for both games.

Divine Force does something weird with its townsfolk NPCs: it doesn’t let you talk to them. Some of them do have chatter, but you can’t read any of it (unless you turn on an obscure option buried in a menu somewhere that I went the entire game without finding). It’s voiced but barely audible, and even if you stand still in the right place long enough to hear it there’s a good chance your party members will start talking over it to remind you where the next plot trigger is (which is completely unnecessary as there’s always a map marker for that as well). It quickly becomes clear that it’s just not worth the bother.

I can’t wrap my head around this. Why in the world would a game do this? It feels like a decision by committee where the result is far more expensive and far less effective than just having text bubbles. And because you don’t talk to the townspeople, the world feels empty apart from the major characters.

The most frustrating instance of this is a part where you are visiting a town to meet someone who lives there. Their home is all the way in the back, so you need to walk through the entire town past many NPCs to reach it. Once you get there, the cutscene dialog implies you’ve learned a lot about the person you’re meeting by talking to the townsfolk about the things this person has done for the town. This had not happened for me even a little. Again, it feels like design by committee: in most RPGs, putting the character’s house at the back of the town would absolutely have had this result and it would have been a great way to introduce this character, but here the effect was ruined by how Divine Force handles NPC dialog.

Contrast this with a couple scenes in Second Story, which has the traditional talk-to-any-NPC-for-text-bubble-dialog approach. When you reach the game’s second town, the tavern is full of miners. If you talk to them, you learn that work in the local mine has been stopped. As you advance the plot, you eventually solve the issue that required closing the mine. If you return to the bar after this, it’s empty and the barkeep laments that all the miners have gone back to work so his business has slowed to a crawl.

I love this little touch. It makes the world feel real, like your actions are actually making a difference to real people.

Sometimes an RPG will do something so bizarre that it destroys its illusion in one fell swoop (see my reaction to Lost Sphear). It can be harder to see the more spread-out impact of having or not having NPCs to react realistically to a story’s events (see Shamus Young writing about this in the first two Mass Effect games), but it can make a huge cumulative difference in how satisfying a game’s world is to inhabit. It’s definitely part of why I still consider Second Story to be the best Star Ocean.

#star ocean: the second story r, #star ocean: the divine force

Star Ocean: The Second Story R Ending Checklist

2023-12-31T19:25:52+00:00

I’ve been playing Star Ocean: The Second Story R and loving it.

Among the many improvements in this remake are some that make it much easier to collect different endings (much appreciated since there are ninety-nine of them). I decided to make myself a checklist tool, and then I figured I might as well publish it. Pretty niche, but maybe someone out there will get some value from it. So here it is.

Star Ocean: The Second Story R Ending Checklist

Oh, and happy new year.

#star ocean, #star ocean: the second story r

My Top Five Games of 2023

2023-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

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

Star Ocean: The Second Story R
Star Trek: Resurgence
Sonic Frontiers
Star Ocean: The Divine Force
The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog

Again, this is most of what I actually played this year. I almost called this “My Five Games” instead of “My Top Five Games”.

Special award for joy that comes less from the game itself and more from the social experience the game enables:

Guess The Game, which I play daily with Allie
Farming Simulator 22, which I play with Senpai-chan

Games that came out this year that I didn’t get to but which are high on my wishlist:

SteamWorld Build
Dave the Diver
Sea of Stars

Top games I’d like to see announced:

A follow-up to Kirby and the Forgotten Land
A follow-up to Star Trek: Resurgence

#top ten

Minor design decisions and immersion in Star Trek: Resurgence

2023-09-03T08:55:10-07:00

I finally played Star Trek: Resurgence, which I’d had my eye on for some time. It’s an interesting game in its own right, but also significant as the first game from Dramatic Labs (a studio formed by Telltale Games veterans) and as part of a new wave of licensed Star Trek games during an exciting time for that franchise.

So naturally I’m here to ignore all of that and instead discuss a specific design decision that most people would probably ignore instead of fixating on. (What can I say? You come to my house, you get my bullshit.)

Okay, so. Resurgence is mostly a game about making choices. There are a few other flavors of gameplay including stealth/combat sequences, shuttlecraft piloting, walking around and investigating areas, a handful of minigames and QTEs, and so on. But the core is making dialog choices that have various effects on the characters and the relationships between them.

Correspondingly, those choices are the foundation of the game’s achievements/trophies. There aren’t any for, say, clearing a combat section without taking damage. None of them are skill-based (except inasmuch as you need to be able to complete all previous parts of the game to reach the particular decision the achievement is for) and I think that’s absolutely the right call. Those more-active parts of the game are for pacing and immersion; it’d be weird to turn them into things the player has to master for full completion.

What seems like a less-right call to me is that the achievements aren’t for passing decision points, but for making specific choices. Like at one point there’s a crisis, both your science officer and security officer have recommendations for getting through it, and you have to decide which one to follow. There isn’t a trophy for getting through the crisis: there’s one for following the science officer’s recommendation and one for following the security officer’s. Almost all the achievements are like that. (On PlayStation, there is additionally the Platinum trophy for getting all other trophies; on Xbox, there are additionally three progress trophies for getting through the three “acts” of the game.)

Now, that does mean that a player’s achievement list for the game becomes a reference for the choices they made, which is kind of a cool thing to have and to be able to share with other players (though the achievements have pretty explicit descriptions so the list is full of GIANT SPOILERS until you finish a playthrough). But the game’s website already provides a mechanism for this, and achievements are particularly poorly-suited to this goal.

By positioning all the alternative choices as items in a completion checklist, the game signals that you should see them all before you can consider yourself truly done. This isn’t as obnoxious as it was in Q.U.B.E. 2, because the game is at least about the choices and there is new stuff to see on a replay, though I still think it smacks of insecure design. But it does mean that anyone who replays the game to make other choices and get all the achievements renders their list useless as a reference for their “actual” choices—and it turns those choices from ones that allow the player to express something about their values to obligatory ones that are just checked off a list with no personal meaning. And the more effective the game has been at creating a real-feeling world and characters, the less interested I am in doing that.

(It’s the same reason I was so relieved to see that Resurgence didn’t have secrets or collectibles. Hunting through all corners of the map to find golden ships or research data would destroy immersion instantly; I was really happy I could just go where my character would go and not worry that I would be mechanically punished for it.)

Resurgence wasn’t a perfect game, but it did a better job than anything else ever has at making me feel like a Starfleet officer. I loved the scenarios it put me in and the opportunity to make decisions that best reflected Federation values and balanced protecting my crew with advancing our mission. I recognize that I’m more sensitive to this than others, but I resent feeling nudged to go back and make different decisions that will turn Resurgence from a world populated with people to a series of arbitrary levers to pull.

#star trek: resurgence, #achievement design, #immersion

Convenience Features and Lazy Asceticism

2023-06-21T07:12:16-07:00

It’s common for people to complain about a game getting convenience/difficulty/accessibility/approachability features they personally won’t use and which thus won’t directly affect their own experience. My mental model has been that this happens for several reasons. In no particular order:

Status quo bias. If you already like something, change is scary.
Status signaling. If more people can do something, that thing is less impressive.
Gatekeeping. The more people enter a given fandom/community, the more the community changes to be like the mainstream, and the more the property will change to target mainstream tastes. (I haven’t written about this subject directly yet, though I’ve brushed up against it. My feelings are complicated and mixed: it frustrates me when something niche that I like reinvents itself to chase mass appeal, but there are also properties that I only fell in love with after they did that. Something to dig into another time.)
Opportunity costs. If a developer spends time on these features, that will consume resources that could have gone elsewhere.
The “intended experience”. I disagree with this one pretty strongly, but my attempt to frame it generously would be something like: Giving the player more ways to tweak the experience makes it more likely they will change it to a version significantly worse than what they could have had. (Sometimes this comes with half-hearted concessions for accessibility.)

For the first four of these, I can at least understand where people are coming from. I generally think they are not sufficient reasons to keep these kinds of features out of games (at least games that aren’t super-small and super-niche) but I can at least see the possible outcomes these people say they want to prevent. There’s something real going on there.

But for that last one, “intended experience,” I’ve always been a bit confused. I’ve usually chalked it up to a lack of empathy, with people not realizing these features are for someone else and just because you wouldn’t use or benefit from them doesn’t mean nobody would. Lately, though, I’ve been thinking - what if the problem is actually that people don’t want these features because they would use them?

Take this write-up about Steam’s then-upcoming (now released) note-taking feature:

[T]here’s one thing I’m quite upset about, and that’s the new Notes app. I love a good notebook game, you know? Fiddling out puzzles in Tunic, remembering patterns in The Witness… Notebook games are great. But I fear this new Notes app will kill that kind of note-taking dead. And that makes me sad. . . .

[A]s much as I like physical notebook games, I know full well that I’ll opt for the easy, in-game version as soon as it’s available. Because ultimately, I’m a lazy creature at heart, and balancing a notebook on my knee while playing games on Steam Deck isn’t nearly as easy as having one open on my desk.

I assume there’s some exaggeration for comedic (and engagement-seeking) effect here, but I feel like I’ve seen this sort of sentiment expressed far too many times for it to not be at least somewhat a Real Thing. I’ve discussed something similar with what I called “checklist features” - things like quest logs and map icons that are very helpful for some players but ruin the feeling of exploration and freedom for others even if they are optional. But this takes things further. It’s less about breaking an illusion and more about people sabotaging their own experiences.

For convenience, and based on the above write-up justifying this view by identifying as “lazy,” I’m going to call this position “lazy asceticism” and the people who hold it “lazy ascetics.” Lazy ascetics seem to honestly claim that they prefer a specific kind of higher-friction experience (taking physical notes, playing on a brutally-hard difficulty, etc.) but also that if a lower-friction experience (taking digital notes, playing on an easier difficulty, etc.) is a feasible option, they will choose that experience instead, even though they know they will enjoy it less.

This… blows my mind a bit? I mean, I understand things like akrasia and procrastination and so on, where (to oversimplify) you do something you’ll enjoy more now even though you know you’ll regret it later. But this doesn’t seem to be like that? This is someone engaged in a recreational activity, the purpose of which is enjoyment, choosing to do something they’ll enjoy less even in the moment because it is, in some sense, easier.

Like, imagine that a game patches in a literal “win button”. Pressing this button unlocks the “beat the game” achievement and rolls credits before depositing you back on the main menu. To me, it’s patently obvious that (novelty value aside) this wouldn’t be any fun. I’d play the game without using it and wouldn’t be haunted by a nagging feeling that I could simply stop and hit the button at any time. I’m here to experience the game in a particular way; why would I be tempted by a way that isn’t appealing?

I suspect that even lazy ascetics would handle this absurdly-exaggerated-extreme the same way. But to me, it sure seems like optional convenience features and easy modes are essentially just more-targeted friction-removers that tap into the same thing. If I know I’d enjoy a game less with all the Assist Mode features turned on, I’m not tempted to use them. I don’t see why lazy ascetics are.

I assume this is another one of those cases where the same stimuli are experienced differently by different people based on subtle and illegible differences in our brains, because this view seems to be pretty common and it makes zero sense to me. And because I don’t understand these people’s internal experiences and am speculating based on plausible-sounding but unflattering possible explanations, all my ideas come out pretty self-serving.

Like, maybe lazy ascetics don’t actually want those higher-friction experiences on their own merits. Maybe they just want to be able to think of and describe themselves as the sort of person who does because they think it’s cool to be someone who writes in physical notebooks or beats games on Extreme difficulty, and they’re lying to themselves. People like me who play on Easy when we want to and Hard when we want to are just more capable of being honest with ourselves about what we actually want, and lazy ascetics will have a better time if they just admit who they really are and do what they truly enjoy.

Or maybe lazy ascetics are just incredibly suggestible to the point where they are incapable of choosing their own experiences based on their own preferences. Maybe they’re the sort of person who needs to uninstall every social media app or they’ll spend all day endlessly scrolling even though they don’t want to just because the option is there. People like me who can be aware of convenience features without using them have better self-determination and are more resistant to manipulation, and lazy ascetics would be well-served by training up their willpower a bit. (I’ve seen people tout the value of playing games on high difficulty to train perseverance and other important skills, and occasionally even done that myself. Maybe lazy ascetics should toughen up by playing games with those features and not using them to train the skill of choosing their own experiences rather than taking whatever path has been greased-up for them, so they can do what they enjoy and what’s good for them and not just what some corporation has made easy because it’s profitable.)

I’m immediately suspicious of these theories, of course. I don’t want to fall into the same trap I did when I first wrote about punishment in games. But I’m still left feeling that I don’t understand what’s actually happening here and would love to hear an explanation from a lazy ascetic (maybe they can give me a better name for them, too).

#difficulty, #neurodivergencies

Sonic Frontiers on Hard (to understand) Mode

2023-06-10T10:15:19-07:00

Sonic Frontiers does something really weird with its final boss fight and I wanna talk about it.

Obviously, mechanical spoilers follow. No narrative ones, though.

As a bit of background: Sonic Frontiers has difficulty modes. You can pick Easy, Normal, or Hard and change it at any time. (There’s an unlockable Extreme difficulty but that works differently and is beyond the scope of this post.) This is already a bit unusual for a Sonic game, since Sonic games don’t generally have the sorts of stats that are tweaked by difficulty modes. But in Frontiers, Sonic has has attack and defense stats that you level up over the course of the game, and its difficulty modes basically buff/nerf these stats. No other mechanics or gameplay are affected; this is only about combat.

Honestly, that’s already a bit weird to me on a couple levels. I’ve always been leery of statistics-tweaking difficulty modes in games where the statistics in question are already partially under the user’s control. It puts a weird spotlight on the purpose of having stats that level up in the first place. Like, if I play an RPG and find that I’m underleveled/undergeared for a boss fight, I could go spend time grinding levels or farming gear and come back with higher stats - or I could just lower the difficulty for the same effect. Is farming/grinding somehow more legitimate a solution? If so, why? These questions go to weird places.

But also, non-trivial combat in Sonic has always felt out of place to me. In early Sonic games, enemies are just another kind of level feature. (Except for bosses; we’ll come back to those.) They are threats that have to be dealt with in specific ways but also can be used to reach places you otherwise couldn’t. What makes them an interesting challenge is the need for the player to recognize them and respond correctly to avoid damage and/or take advantage of their placements, similar to cues in a rhythm game. So it makes sense that enemies should only take a single hit to dispatch - if you instead have to halt forward momentum for multiple seconds to deal with a single enemy, that’s a pointless interruption to what you’re there to enjoy. (At least, that’s how I felt about it when it started happening, I wanna say in Sonic Heroes.) Stats really shouldn’t be relevant because everything dies in one hit.

Boss fights are a different situation, though frankly a lot of those have felt out of place to me too. It’s always risky to take a game that isn’t about fighting and have its climaxes be about fighting; generally the best way to handle it is to just reskin the game’s normal mechanics. To me, the best Sonic boss fights are the ones where you’re just doing a bit of platforming and then landing a hit on the boss, repeat three-ish times, fight over. Again, stats don’t enter into it.

In Sonic Frontiers, this isn’t how it works. Enemies that show up during platforming segments serve the same purpose as in older games, and correspondingly they go down in a single hit no matter what. But there are also a ton of varied enemies you find in the open world, and these fights are nontrivial. These enemies take multiple hits, and the number of hits depends on your stats. Similarly, the bosses (and minibosses) often require some platforming to position yourself to attack them, but then you get a time-limited window and the amount of damage you can do in that time (and therefore the number of times you need to do the platforming bits) depends on your stats.

Making this a bit more interesting is the variety of attacks and combos you can perform, which are unlocked from a skill tree. Picking up new attack combo skills still feels weird to me in a Sonic game and they don’t have much depth, so I read the whole system as existing to just make sure combat isn’t too dull, to give it a sense of progression (though if you’re not rushing you can easily max out the skill tree less than halfway through the game), and to give you more things to collect in the open world (skills and stat boosts all come from accumulating collectibles).

So. Everything with combat feels like a system layered on top of the game to give it more texture. And the difficulty modes are really a mechanical focus slider for how much you want to have to pay attention to combat and its associated systems. Want to fill out the skill tree and put together crazy combos and dish out tons of damage? Play on Hard, and you’ll have a reason to do so. Don’t think that sounds like a fun thing to do in a Sonic game? Play on Easy, and you won’t have to. Everything else about the game, especially the platforming that’s much more central to the experience, will be the same.

So it seems misleading to me to call these difficulty modes at all - it’s not like they reduce the number of collectibles you need to progress or make the S-rank time targets less strict or anything. Playing Sonic Frontiers on Easy isn’t playing an easier Sonic game; it’s playing one with less combat focus and which is thus more like most Sonic games.

But that kind of thing is (frustratingly) common and isn’t the weird thing I want to talk about. So let’s move on to the next piece of background here: the minigames.

Another way Sonic Frontiers spices up the gameplay is through a number of weird minigame challenges. (Interestingly, while a lot of the game’s content is optional, I’m pretty sure all of these are required to progress.) Stuff like herding a group of Kocos or skydiving through a weird obstacle course. Most of them are shallow and unfun repackagings of the game’s existing mechanics. The one that’s the most disconnected from normal gameplay is the hacking minigame, which you do a few times and which is, for some reason, a polarity shmup reminiscent of games like Ikaruga. You and your enemies shoot light and dark bullets, you are immune to the kind of bullets you are currently shooting, and shooting down same-color bullets charges a powerful homing attack. Destroy all the enemies without running out of lives.

It’s a little weird to have a shmup in Sonic, but off-genre hacking minigames is far from unusual, as is off-genre gameplay in Sonic. But again, this is just background. Now we can talk about the really weird thing.

The final boss fight is two fights in a row. On Easy and Normal, once you finish the first fight, apparently you get a cutscene with a couple QTEs to represent the second fight. (From what I read; I played on Hard myself.) But on Hard, there’s a full-blown second fight which is played as an extended and significantly harder polarity shmup sequence. I’m sure it’s not as hard as an actual Ikaruga level or anything, but it’s long and the enemy has new deadly attacks that bring it much closer to a bullet hell than before. And if you beat this fight, you get an extra post-credits scene.

This is the only thing that the difficulty modes affect besides combat stats, it’s at the very end of the game, and it’s not telegraphed in any way. If you’ve opted for more mechanical focus on combat… surprise, the final boss now has a shmup level that has nothing to do with the normal combat system or stats and instead is a bigger tougher version of the hacking minigame. And if you didn’t do this, then you miss a bit of extra story.

(To be fair: you can change difficulty at any time and continuing a game clear save puts you right before the final boss so you can just put the difficulty to Hard and do the fight again if you find out about this and want to experience it, and the extra scene is really short so you aren’t missing much if you don’t see it.)

Can you imagine this for other games? What if playing Bioshock on Hard inserted a tough Pipe Dream level into the final boss? Or if playing Mass Effect on hard added a tough Frogger level at the end?

I’m really curious why this happened. I know there were a lot of scrapped plans for Frontiers’s final act; I wonder if the shmup gameplay was originally intended to be more central in a way that would have made it make sense as part of the final boss fight, but they’d finished that sequence and not wanted to scrap it, so they compromised and shoved it into Hard mode so only the players who were signing up for maximum challenge would be blocked by it (and they could drop down to Normal if they wanted to skip it… though again, you’d have to somehow learn that doing so would have that effect).

If that’s what happened, I can basically understand it. But I take exception to withholding a cutscene from players who didn’t want to spend time punching, kicking, and shooting in their Sonic game.

#sonic frontiers, #difficulty

Steam Deck and new AAA games

2023-06-10T08:36:47-07:00

When I bought a Steam Deck, I wasn’t too concerned about its specs or compatibility with new stuff. As a rule, I don’t exactly rush to play the latest AAA releases. But sometimes I want to play a newish big-ticket game that happens to be significantly worse on Steam Deck.

Sonic Frontiers was one of those games. It’s perfectly playable on the Deck and the graphical issues didn’t get in the way of the experience I wanted, but they did make me laugh when I saw that there was a photo mode.

I do love it when games allow for creative expression that you can capture as persistent play artifacts, but it’s hard to get excited about setting up photo ops when the platform I’m on means the resulting image will cap out at 720p with limits on draw distance and texture quality and possible glitches.

This kind of thing doesn’t happen often enough that it would be remotely worth buying a new gaming PC or current-gen console, but it happens enough to be annoying. It’s another reason to hope that the Steam Deck keeps doing well and becomes a widely-targeted platform by the AA and AAA studios and not just the indies.

#steam deck, #sonic frontiers, #photo mode