Jeff Gerstmann's NES ranking project - where he plays a handful of NES titles for a half-hour to an hour or so each in an effort to work his way through the entire library and rank it based on his experiences - has been a highlight of my week ever since he launched it a few years ago. It's brought a spotlight to underappreciated or to-me unknown games and has inspired me to try out, replay, or put a mental "to do" stamp next to several titles. It's also been neat to go to the various reaction threads post-episode and read everyone's takes on or memories of a given title.
I should note that Gerstmann's opinion, though he's well-played and usually an interesting listen, had little to do with my choices. Sometimes it helps: I really enjoyed the proto-emoji match-three or four or six or seven unlicensed puzzle game Krazy Kreatures, which offers friendly visuals and demands a satisfying level of quick thinking and which Jeff liked as well. It can be tough to know how a puzzle game handles without hands-on experience, so personal impressions are a big boost there. But one of the other games I played to completion, for example, was LJN's Jaws, a sea-themed shoot-'em-up with a friendly aesthetic. It has dumb, Atari-level score attack-ish gameplay but breaks it up into bite-sized chunks with level-by-level objectives and a simple power-up system. Runs amount to a comfortable 30 minutes or so, and the dang thing can be completed, capped off with a smile-you-SOB confrontation, which gives a feeling of satisfaction. It's extremely simple, and Jeff ranked it as appropriately middling, but it shows how very primitive gameplay can be more enjoyable married to fun graphics and mechanics just a little further up the evolutionary ladder. It's the type of curiosity that's not remarkable enough to merit extended conversation or accolades but which might pique your interest for a few painless runs if, say, someone's playing it for a ranking project.
Seeing some titles again sparks personal memories that prompt reexploration - such as Mickey Mousecapade, one of those games, like Rygar and Wizards & Warriors, that everyone on the playground just knew for no discernible reason and that enjoyed a healthy life on the rental circuit despite lacking a point of marketability (Mickey Mouse didn't have widespread popularity in the 80s). I wanted to put it to bed again to see if there were anything to the damn thing after all these years (no, not really). Sometimes I want to try out a title for myself that Jeff seems to have given short shrift, such as the action RPG Conquest of the Crystal Palace, which looks polished and seems to have a good deal of thought behind its mechanics and friendly, Clash at Demonhead-ish visuals - and, well, this very post was spun off of a forthcoming write-up of my feelings on replaying Final Fantasy after Gerstmann panned it to hype up his own childhood favorite of Dragon Warrior. The upshot is: I've been using Jeff's project from a variety of avenues to discover titles I would like to play myself, and to seek out opinions and memories from other players, not just Jeff.
My experience doesn't seem to be typical, though. Ranking projects like this used to refer to their results glibly as "scientific," and while that used to be understood commonly as a joke - since, you know, rankings are by definition opinions and therefore inherently unscientific - both the rankers and their audiences seem to have come to take this label seriously. For example, I remember one YouTube commenter on the Little Nemo ep lamenting that since Jeff didn't like the game, he owns experience was considerably dimmed, with another commiserating about having the blindfold of nostalgia (any positive feelings about a game from one's own past experience are inevitably labeled as "nostalgia") lifted and seeing the light of objective truth that was Jeff's indisputably-correct opinion. That was an early ep, and this has problem only gotten worse with time: on both the subreddit and the ResetEra thread, most of the personal takes and memories I mentioned enjoying have been crowded out with tired jokes bleating the "science!" meme and rigid insistence that Jeff's experience is the only valid one.
(An aside: People in hobbies such as gaming are extraordinarily bad in noting when a joke has run its course. Most seem convinced that if it's the 512th time a joke has been made, that just means it's 512 times as funny.)
Part of this attitude, I think, is just audience identification with the streamer's opinion. Identifying with and agreeing with a streamer's frustrations in playing a title, or championing the things they champion, is considered a basic show of support - just common courtesy. It's born of a pure feeling, the desire to support someone whom you like and who entertains you, but I don't think it's wholly healthy (you can enjoy somebody's content and not agree with every single thing they say, you know - and you're not obliged to give voice to every point of disagreement). Plus, it seems to be carried to an extreme nowadays: to take watching the streamer's experience of the game as equal to hands-on experience, to defer to the streamer to a degree that their experience is taken as the only experience. Obviously, you can learn a good deal about a game by watching it, and observed here, most if not all of us have titles out of which we've gotten a great deal of enjoyment solely through LPs and such. There are many ways of enjoying a game - watching tournaments or challenges, chat votes on in-game decisions, watching others (be it chat or streamer) react to the developments of a familiar title - that can be had only secondhand. I think it's also good to keep in mind, though, that in most cases, watching isn't a 1:1 substitute for playing and engaging with a game yourself, and engaging with a title yourself, with an open mind, can also be valuable. (I am again reminded of the Obscuritory's article on the trouble with getting people to attempt to engage with games on their own terms instead of automatically engaging on them with contempt and as fodder, prima facie ludicrous and contemptible, for derisive incredulous react material. Unfortunately, I'm not finding the exact story I recall, but this article, and this linked story by game dev Nathalie Lawson, cover some of the points.)
Another part of it, I think, is particular to the current moment, where it seems more common to equate having tastes or opinions that are different from those of one's friends with insulting them. It's a particular danger with Gerstmann's project, as the diehards who populate the discussions of material from Giant Bomb alumni are particularly strident in this mindset. (Frankly, it was encouraged by Giant Bomb in its dying days, when the personalities were on edge from numerous, then-unvoiced offscreen stresses and would take it out on the fans, who then would blame the negative among them for their heroes' irritation and encourage lockstep fealty. It wouldn't help, since the real problems were offscreen, but it led to a vicious cycle of blame, where more and more fans were driven away by imagined slights and failure to adhere to impossible behavior standards until only those diehards were left.) For example: How many Mega Man 2 vs. 3 forum battles have you read in your lifetime? Well, read this: perhaps the first message board discussion of the topic ever in which most everyone pretends that no one likes 3, that everyone hates it and it's never had any supporters ever. This is all because Jeff believes that no Mega Man games at all - in the original series, the X series, the portable titles - should have been made after Mega Man 2.
I seem excessively negative toward Gerstmann's project and the attitudes of absolutely correctness I perceive, I suppose. It do think it's been a net positive. I also think, though, that it'd be better if more viewers were open to playing the games themselves rather than parroting "science!" memes.
Maybe you should quit your job. (Type Help, Day Repeat Day, Dead Letter Dept., Strange Horticulture)
Type Help
What's your job?: Some manner of data investigator.
Responsibilities: A recently-deceased colleague left behind some old notes on an unsolved And Then There Were None-style murder, sealed for decades for unknown reasons. Plumb the depths of his ancient machine, read his files, and try to piece together what happened and why this case was sealed.
What's the problem?: Only a few files are initially accessible; your first job is to figure out the naming scheme so you can start access the rest (though this reveals further complications). The files also have additional encoding that must be sussed out from context; the computer system still has a few twists in wait; and even after all the tech problems, there's still the issue of: How and why did all these people die?
(Note: This is a freeware text adventure; there are no images and no audio. I didn't need them and found the game compelling without them, but just so you know.)
On one hand, Type Help has some compelling and smart gameplay, strong prose, and a really excellent twist in the middle to its And Then There Were None scenario where I intensely wanted to see what was going on. (The death on the bed is the most disturbing scene I've seen in a while - not through gore, as there is none, but just through sheer ideas.) On the other hand - um, there actually IS nothing going on. The game doesn't really have an ending; it just...stops. I know some folks are gonna say "ooooOOOOOoooooh it's more MYSTERIOUS that way," but this is an instance, to steal from Roger Ebert, where less is not more. Less is actually less. (Even the handwave we're given makes no sense; what was with the thunderclaps, then?) Type Help has some dynamite ideas, but they deserved a smarter, stronger follow-through, and they didn't get it. Given the weak denouement, I don't think Type Help is going to have quite the legs that Her Story, Return of the Obra Dinn, or The Roottrees Are Dead have.
Also: while I appreciate the dev letting you create and load from actual files you can save on your hard drive for his browser game, that has a bit of inherent diciness due to browser shenanigans (I had to futz with Vivaldi a bit after it glitched and wouldn't save an updated file). I know Roottrees took this release path successfully, but I wish devs would stop putting these lengthy mystery games on browser-based platforms. Just let me give you money in exchange for a reliable saving system and the luxury of not feeling like I have to solve the entire case in one sitting. (I literally just looked up the last thing because I was feeling a little nauseous after playing the game for 5 hours straight.) I want to savor your game, not feel like I have to speedrun it the first time through!
Day Repeat Day
What's your job?: Corporate drone in order fulfillment.
Responsibilities: Scheduling shipment of various deliveries through a Match-3 interface.
What's the problem?: You took this job because your art degree's not in high demand on the employment market, and you're questioning where, if anywhere, this prospective career path is gonna lead you. Also, this is partially a visual novel, and your brother's struggling with a drinking problem (well, it's more like you're struggling with it - he seems perfectly fine with just hitting you up for cash with increasing frequency), while your nominal ex-girlfriend seems invested in stringing you along while painting any attempts at boundary-setting as toxic behavior on your part. Furthermore, Sadako seems to be sending you curse videos drawn from '50s workplace documentaries in between levels.
The twists on Match-3 gameplay are good - limited moves, modes where you have to clear every starting tile on a given grid, or clear pieces closed off on the sides of the grid by maneuvering & setting off "clear column" or "clear row" pieces, etc. - and I understand they get better, but I think I'm more satisfied with the way my story turned out: I left the ex on read, arranged to meet a receptive coworker for coffee, turned down the brother's latest loan demand, and went to look for another job after my protag expressed the thought that he just couldn't do this anymore. It was - and I say this honestly, without sarcasm - a complete, satisfying interactive experience for me in the span of 43 minutes.
(If you need more out of a game: the price tag on sale's three bucks, and while it's another artistic work about how being a cog in the corporate gears dehumanizes you, I think the Match-3 gameplay and choices afforded by the visual novel elements deliver well enough. But I was honestly thought the ending I chose for the character was the most satisfying.)
Dead Letter Dept.
What's your job?: "Data Conversion Operator."
Responsibilities: You type in handwritten or damaged addresses on mail the OCR can't make out.
What's the problem?: Your pay doesn't quite make apartment rent, even in Wisconsin (this is the rare Wisconsin-based title). Also, the mail seems to want to kill you.
You're here to see creepy mail, and the devs delivered. There is some excellent creepy mail in this title.
There are problems that get in the way of Creepy Mail Enjoyment, though. First, the devs have you spend a few minutes walking to your job each day, presumably to underline the hopelessness of the daily grind and bleakness of your shitty surroundings and employment sitch, but it's in practice just a tedious annoyance that gets between you and the USPS. I looked it up, and there are things you can do in your apartment to get different endings, but after the first walk, they should have just had you arrive at your job after exiting the apartment.
Second, you can save only once per run. A run supposedly takes about two hours, but it can be longer if you run into a few problem pieces of mail, and this is a game that can be physically taxing (see below). I assume this is meant to make you feel worn-down and compelled to work like the character, but I just found it a needless aggravation.
Third: The core of the game is making out hard-to-read handwriting and typing, and sometimes, the game approaches this by making text very blurry or very small. I can handle both individually, but both at once tends to give me eyestrain. I felt sick, and had to call my session, after attempting to type about 50 lines of light-colored tiny text that was printed sideways on one piece of mail. There's a "magnify" button, but it doesn't always help as much as you'd like.
(Note: The 50 lines of tiny text were a red herring, by the way. On pieces of mail where it seems you have to type in a ridiculous amount of text, there's always another, way shorter hidden message the game wants instead. The game is perfectly happy to encourage you to pursue those red herrings, though - there's no "ERROR: MAXIMUM NO. OF LINES EXCEEDED" message to let you know, hey, don't type all that in, we want something else, and the game is perfectly fine with putting you in physical discomfort elsewhere, so a trick like typing in 50 lines of barely-readable, sideways text wouldn't be beyond it.)
I know it sounds like I'm complaining, "hey, the addresses are hard to read in this game where addresses are supposed to be hard to read," but Dead Letter Office uses so many other tricks that don't rely on eyestrain to pull off its gimmick - extravagantly bad handwriting; blotched-out parts of the address where the info is available through other means; etc. The eyestrain traps seem to be inflicting physical discomfort for the sake of it.
This whole thing reminds me: We've made remarkable strides in accessibility in video games in recent years, but we seem to have overlooked that a good number of gamers have passed the threshold of middle age. The Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters, remakes of some of the most influential RPGs of all time, were released with a ridiculously, needlessly cramped, tiny, and hard-to-read font. The Lunar remasters were announced with a spidery font. Again, I understand "hard to read" is part of the bargain for Dead Letter Office, but, as the game itself demonstrates, there are plenty of "hard to read" options that don't inflict eyestrain. "Don't make things stupidly small and don't make stupid font choices" is an absurdly low bar, but it's too much to ask of some games, apparently. (Props to Strange Horticulture, discussed below, for noting the presence of small text and including a magnify function that makes a damn difference.)
The damnable thing: I am actually considering going back to the damn game, physical pain and all, for more creepy mail. Apparently, I can't pass low bars, either.
Strange Horticulture
What's your job?: Not computer-related! You're a horticulturalist.
Responsibilities: Providing the right botanical solutions to resolve your customers' many and varied problems. Uh, you've got a lot of plants, though, and it's not like any of them came with labels...
What's the problem? Besides the challenge of trying to ID dozens of rare & dangerous plants with Victorian-level info-distro tech, it seems the local druids have summoned a murder monster that wants to kill everyone. Fertilize your way out of that, fucker.
It didn't occur to me until another post called it out: this is a big-picture deduction-based game like Obra Dinn, Roottrees, etc. There's a loop of scrutinizing the physical characteristics of the plants in your greenhouse and what your character observes (scent, discharge, numbing/itching/etc. upon touch) to see which entry in your identification grimoire it most closely matches, then unlocking more grimoire pages and clues to new plant locations on your big ol' 500-grid square map of the environs by successfully fulfilling plant orders. You're a bit more on rails here than in the other games: the amount and range of info with which you have to deal at any given time is more limited, and your current objectives are more pointed. It's a more guided, less-freeform experience than the other titles, but it might appeal more to those seeking a more granular experience.
(If we're doing a power ranking, I'd put it: Obra Dinn -> Her Story - Roottrees (may move up a tier if you prefer a longer experience) -> Strange Horticulture -> power gap -> Type Help.)
There are a couple problems. If you mess up too many times, you're sent to a series of minigames to earn another "life," so to speak, but I seemed to get locked up in one, involving find the right key to fit a lock, that just would not progress no matter what I tried. I don't know whether it was ham-handedness on my part - I was pretty sure I had the right key; maybe I was mistaken - but nothing I tried would work, and every wrong choice would multiply the number of keys available, and I just couldn't get out of the death spiral. (It got my first playthrough into an unwinnable state, actually, and I abandoned the game for a couple years before picking it back up- recently.) My advice: if you get one wrong move away from "death" - it's the "A Rising Dread" meter in the lower-left with the wilted tree, which resets at the start of each day - don't take any actions of which you aren't certain: risking wrong plant IDs, going to unfamiliar portions of the map that might fill the meter, etc. You might wanna be cautious after even one hit to your meter, in fact. Treat "death" like permadeath. (I'm making death sound like a bigger threat than it is, but you can run into trouble if you don't know what that meter means and how it can fill up.)
The second is that a couple of the major decisions in the game had the opposite effect than I expected, as the intended target of the plant turned out to be unclear. On Day 10, the choice of plant always concerns the safety of your client. On Day 15, the intended recipient of the plant is the druid.
That said, I had fun returning to this game. The graphics are good at relaying the necessary info for IDs and make the plants look cool and interesting, the game has a minor dark Victorian fantasy vibe that serves to distinguish it, the gameplay loop is really fun, and it's just a pleasant time if you like plants. (The story's not spectacular, but it's serviceable.) Again, it's a more granular, guided experience than similar titles, and it's on the short side (about 5 to 6 hours), which sets it apart - not necessarily in a bad way. Give it a try if you like the deduction genre, as I suppose it can now be called.
As with many '80s kids, The Goonies was my absolute favorite movie as a kid. It was the ultimate explosion of the idea of going out with your friends through your town on a Kids on Bikes backyard adventure. I made a point of catching it on broadcast TV (in the long-forgotten days when the major networks would air theatrical movies in prime time and they were a more reliable method of catching movies after their theatrical runs than VHS tapes, which were at the time expensive & extensively-delayed) whenever it was aired.
The Goonies isn't remembered as fondly nowadays, and - after catching a revival showing at my old high school, where some enterprising band members were projecting it on the side of a tractor trailer - I think it's because the kids yell a whole lot. It's a group of kids together, and to kids, yelling communicates excitement (and The Goonies sure was exciting to this kid!), but when you're an adult, a bunch of kids yelling can be just nails on a chalkboard. That aside, though I didn't come away as besotted with The Goonies as I was as a kid, and though much of the appeal of the movie has to be colored by the lens of childhood, I think it holds up sufficiently, the typical various '80s insensitivities notwithstanding.
Anyhow: given my love of the movie, my mother got me The Goonies II NES game by Konami. (In the U.S., the title billed it as a sequel to the movie, though it's actually a sequel to a previous Goonies game never released stateside.) I predictably played the hell out of it, and the title's garnered a bit of modern prestige by being one of the first Metroidvanias. I have to say, though, that while I recall enjoying the thing after some fashion - I cared enough to beat it, eventually - the overriding memory I had of the title was one of frustration: being stuck in an endless series of rooms, that maddening music looping over and over, hitting and otherwise poking tediously at every surface (as you did to uncover hidden entryways), or otherwise going over and over old territory in a usually-futile attempt to unstick myself and make some progress. The phrase ad nauseam was applicable in every sense. My experience was also colored by an inexplicable and utterly undeduceable bit where you have to, er, hit an old woman five times (and no less than five) with your fist or a hammer in order to obtain a necessary item. This was as much of a roadblock to me as the "kneel by this cliff for several seconds until a whirlwind appears" part of Simon's Quest, and it doesn't come attached to a title with Castlevania ambience or music chops. It's completely unexplained, and it deserves to be every bit as infamous as the Simon's Quest bit.
I recently decided to replay it, though, inspired in part by Jeff Gerstmann's NES ranking project, where it enjoys an in-my-opinion unwarranted ranking of #16 out of 478 games as of this writing. Given my own extensive memories of the title, and the existence in the game of an outright unsolvable puzzle, I'd chalked this up to nostalgia bias on Gerstmann's part. Did the reply change my mind? Well...somewhat, but not really, not fundamentally.
That Last Post:
From all appearances, I posted a few lines about stuff I did in 2024, promised more, and nipped off. I actually do have this post mostly completed on my hard drive, but in the interim, I landed on a new professional job that involves a lot of watching franchise material. With the demands of work and the Translation Project (below), something had to give, and the something was that post. I held off on blogging further primarily due to lack of time but also because I wanted to see that post finished before moving on, but, well, this existence of this post proves that that ain't gonna happen. It will be finished, but not before more new material appears. Sorry.
The Translation Project:
The Translation Project is continuing apace. Not a glamorous update, but there are certain phases of projects where it's just a lot of heads-down work, and the best you can say is "yep, still ongoing." I should be able to make the "end of April" date I projected for my end of the work - that is, of course, providing that no other work or life matters intervene. If that changes, I'll post notification here. (I will say that for purely personal reasons, it would be hard for me to stay on the project past June, and there is a practical limit to the amount of time I can take up from folks who are graciously volunteering their sweat & tears here, so there's a built-in hard stop to faffing about on my end.)
I'm knocking out the larger files first, dedicated to love interest lines; there are numerous smaller files I have basically done but want to check something in the actual game before I send them on. In any event: The part that was the big sticking point for me alone, having a format for the script that's usable for a patch, has graciously been remedied by other parties, and I'm dedicated to seeing a properly-translated version of this game happen, no matter what it takes.
Other folks' writing projects:
On a note: Kimimi wrote an appreciation a few days ago of a certain game. It's a strong overview. It's an excellent fond summary of the Angelique experience: "sitting in a room so pink Barbie would think it was a bit much while a grumpy Guardian tells me how much he dislikes lobster." No, seriously: as essential as that is, Kimimi brings home many of the core characteristics of the franchise: how safe the game's romances and universe are, or its smart use of the smallest actions or bits of dialogue to illustrate character (such as Clavis during the tutorial jumping, so far as he jumps, at the opportunity to teach you how to cut out of conversations quickly), or the importance of soft power on the road to the throne (admittedly, I have a more mercenary view than Kimimi on this).
My site:
Effectively on hiatus until I finish The Translation Project. I'd like to finish up the Beep! magazine Lunar interviews before the Steam rerelease at the end of the month, but that might not be in the cards. It seems as if most people have concluded I'm making up the interviews and Kei Shigema's Lunar 0 ideas, but I can say from decades of experience that that's the Lunar fandom for you (the part of it off Tumblr, anyhow; the fans on Tumblr are uncharacteristically friendly).
Dead by Daylight:
Dead by Daylight is taking a break from content for a big quality-of-life update, and so am I. I was aware of how much of my gaming time it was taking up - mostly not wasted time; I genuinely enjoy the game, and it's made with great love - but it feels so good to make actual progress in other titles I want to play. There was a Resident Evil-themed 2v8 mode I wanted to try, but I missed the deadline, and I think I'm better staying on the wagon, in the end. In retrospect, Brad's years-long obsession with a live service game to the detriment of his personal and professional well-being, considered an anomaly in the day, is more of the more prophetic bits from Giant Bomb.
Tumblr:
I am back on Tumblr. Reservations aside, with the world going to hell (or the United States going to hell and trying to drag the world with it), it's no time to disconnect, I suppose. I don't post there often, but it is my sole social media presence. There are folks there I'm very happy to see again, but there are times when I wonder just what it is I'm doing. I still think the AI mining is, well, a minefield, but it's the only place to social media platform to post and view art that has a opt-out option for AI.
Movies:
I'm OK with the cinematic experience dying now.
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