For the past several years, I've been a contributing writer for Zandra's serialized novel Her Majesty the Prince. I'm really proud of what we've done with it, and if you haven't yet started reading, you've got a great chance: Zandra is beginning to re-serialize all the existing chapters on her blog, now complete with dates to help keep track of the non-linear timeline and a few other tweaks and improvements (including the incredible tarot card Act art by Allison Vansickle).
-
-
nex3 BACKER reviewed Donkey Kong BananzaI miss 3D exploration platformers. I grew up on Banjo Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64 captured my childhood imagination like nothing else. These are both deeply flawed games, of course, and I would struggle to bring myself to call either one "good" today. But to my young sensibilities, they held the promise of intricate and captivating spaces full of things to do and goodies to obtain.
The peak of this evocation of the joy of exploration—and this one I will stand by even as an adult—was Super Mario Sunshine. The worlds in that game were vibrant and alive, each completely distinctive and full of personality that was elaborated on as they subtly shifted form from one shine challenge to the next. And then they never made another game like it again. Super Mario Odyssey comes closest, but while kingdoms like New Donk City were just what I wanted, others like Sand Kingdom felt like mere open world content grids. Still, I was excited to see what this team would do to iterate on the concept.
Sadly, Bananza went in just the opposite direction. The core concept, a landscape made of almost totally destructive material, produces a design that is by its nature at odds with the intricate and captivating spaces that I still yearn for. When you can smash through any wall, there's no room for secret passageways or bespoke assets. Even the notion of "rooms" itself is barely relevant for the worlds you actually move through. The designers have can avoid this when they choose with an unbreakable metal material that forms the foundation of every world and is occasionally used for proper walls, but it's clear they resist the urge to do so because they feel (rightly!) that using it more than sparingly would undermine the core principle of the game.
The result is exploration that doesn't feel like moving through an intricate, meticulously designed space. Instead, it feels muddy. The form of a space doesn't matter, because it's made to be unmade. To a large extent (although mercifully less as the game goes on and develops more interesting nouns) you can just blast through terrain at random and find bananas just... there. Not in a location with an interesting design, not through a challenge, just buried under some largely undifferentiated Substance.
To be fair, there are actually six or so materials in each world. But this is part of the muddiness: nearly everything in every world is made out of some combination of rock, dirt, metal, gold, or a couple world-specific materials. Unlike Odyssey's rich worlds full of bespoke assets, every place in Bananza looks more or less the same. This makes it very difficult to navigate, but worse than that it means the different places within a given layer don't feel distinct, and so even layers that have a lot of interesting verticality to them leave me with the same impression as an open world content grid. When movement within a space feels trivial, the space itself feels trivial.
The titular Bananza mechanic reinforces this sense of triviality. This mechanic is harmful to the game even beyond its own bounds, because it provides the player with a dilemma at all times. Most challenges in the game will be absolutely trivialized by activating Bananza. The early layers are full of concrete walls that can't be broken by DK's normal fists. They can instead be broken either by throwing explosive blocks at them, and so they present a lock-and-key mechanism that forms the foundation of a number of cleverly designed challenges and puzzles. But once you've activated Bananza, you can just punch through them like any other material.
But at the same time, there are challenges that absolutely, unavoidably require a Bananza. And the distinction are never clear: some bosses can't be beaten without Bananza, some are only remotely interesting if you avoid using it. Most puzzles are trivialized by gaining a bunch of extra powers, but a few can't be solved without those powers. So if you're staring at a puzzle, wracking your brain for a solution, there's always a chance that the only legitimate answer is "you should cheat" and also always a chance that cheating will totally deprive you of the fun of actually figuring it out.
The fundamentals on which this game is built are flawed. They misunderstand what's fun about the exploratory promise of the genre (although I suppose I have to admit that others may be looking for different things from the genre than I am given the game's average rating). But I will say this: the level design itself speaks to a huge amount of skill from the designers. They took a flawed premise and did the best they could with it, and the result is still pretty impressive considering the raw material. Some of the challenges, like finding the lost Fractone pieces by sculpting the terrain so they have a flat path to walk to their parent, speak to a way of engaging with the terrain that almost makes the premise seem worthwhile. But even that tremendous skill wasn't enough to make me want to reliably pick this up and keep playing. -
contrary to common misconceptions, the average French person can survive three or even four days without going to a café or bistrot
-
-
the server asked if I wanted "sparkling or still" so I asked for still but it arrived well above 0°K and your honor that's why I'm seeking $50,000 in emotional damages
-
sometimes I wonder how many historical and archaeological data we've tried to understand as serious expressions of their creators' thoughts and impressions are actually jokes someone did to be silly
-
im gonna start a band making experimental music and we're gonna go on tour and the opener is gonna be a lecture series on the geological formation of mesas and similar structures and our fans are gonna love it all screaming and taking off their shirts for cliff-and-bench topography and then we're going to take the stage and play a single note for two straight hours cycling between forty-eight different instruments and by the time the audience gets home they will bear g flat in their very bones
-
nex3 BACKER reviewed Elden Ring: NightreignI've played a lot of Nightreign. I'm still playing a lot of Nightreign. In the month and a half it's been out, it quickly became a member of the hundo club, it got me fully back into wiki editing and data mining, and even after beating every nightlord numerous times and completing every character quest I'll still cheerfully hop into a run any time anyone asks. The only reason I'm marking this "completed" now is because I want to get this review out of my head and onto the web.
If you'll permit a digression, I deeply admire Elden Ring's parsimony. It's a huge game made be a relatively small company who had largely made relatively small games up to that point, and it accomplishes that with an economy of design I consider admirable. I know people complain about the re-used bosses, but there are actually very few of the 165 that are true duplicates of one another. Instead, they add little variations here and there, pair them with other bosses for duo encounters, or ramp up the complexity of their abilities over the course of the game. The small dungeons are the same way: they take a limited set of shared components, then mix and match them in different novel ways. These raw materials are a palette of paints that they re-use and recombine over and over to paint the entire game.
Most large games work this way to some extent, but in Elden Ring the quality of the design at each point really shines through in large part because it draws attention to the patterns and repetitions. You know a catacomb is going to have imps or skeletons and some sort of clever trick, you know a watchdog is going to do some kind of elemental damage, you know a hero's grave is going to make you want to claw out your eyes. But you don't know exactly how—it sets up just enough expectations for it to be able to play with them and continue to surprise you throughout its massive length.
If Elden Ring is a painting and its palette, Nightreign is another artist picking up the same palette and painting something entirely different. It stands as much in the tradition of unofficial mods as it does the tradition of classic soulslikes—it's related to Elden Ring in more or less the same way Defense of the Ancients is related to Warcraft III. The nouns and verbs are largely the same, but the context in which they exist is completely different and utterly surprising. After spending more than a decade as industry trendsetters, carving out a new genre and driving other studios insane trying to match their success in it despite going against all conventional wisdom, From Software has now put out a game that is itself reacting to trends in the industry. Not only that, it's integrating two trends—battle royales and…
-
every beautiful Shakespeare line about love comes from one of three sources:
- complete idiot who ends up happy despite their every effort to the contrary
- innocent and tenderhearted angel who's about to have the worst day of their life and then die badly
- sonnet
-
posted on postnow.site Replacing Jobs
My mom is a copy-editor, a job that has been ostensibly replaceable by spellcheck for what, 30 years? 40?
Anyway, it’s interesting how you can basically always tell when a publication has decided they don’t need a copy editor