Videogames – Spectre Collie

A Civilization Of One’s Own

Following up on my initial thoughts about Civilization 7, now that I’ve completed a game.

I already gave my initial impressions of Civilization 7 after completing the first “age” in my first game. That was mostly in reaction to all the negative comments I’d been hearing about the new installment, and how much I disagreed with them. Even after decades of seeing game fans overreact to everything, with grown adults perpetually losing their shit over the most minor inconveniences, I still haven’t learned that the stuff video game people say online only ever has the barest connection to our shared reality.

My initial impression was that the game does have several issues, ones that can and hopefully will be fixed in patches and expansions. But at its core, it’s still got the feel of the best Civilization installments, letting you grow a huge empire and compelling you to keep taking one more turn until you’ve lost entire days to it.

And after losing a couple of days to it, I’ll stand by that take. It’s pretty good.

It’s still a little “mushy” in the mid game and end game, where I felt like I was pulling a lot of levers and flipping a lot of switches (figuratively), but didn’t have a clear idea of what my goals were or how to achieve them. The game straight-up fails to give you the information you need in a way that’s useful. It’s not just a lack of tooltips; even going to the Civilopedia to look up a concept usually gave me no idea of how to do it in game.

I’m guessing that’s an issue they were aware of, since each age starts by having you choose a single advisor to give you MMORPG quest chain-style goals that remain on screen at all times. Theoretically, this would focus all of your efforts while playing, but in my game at least, there wasn’t enough info. I was told to go for the “rail tycoon victory,” with an indication of how many points I’d achieved so far, but no indication of what actually generates the points.

That also has the side-effect of making the ends of ages anti-climactic. Even if you choose to focus on one goal, the others remain active (of course). By the end of my game, I had focused everything onto the space race. Ideally this would’ve meant a big transition for my civilization in which I had to set up supply chains and technology trees and the like, but really it just meant finding the one city that had the highest production value in my civ, starting a single project, and then hoping it finished before anyone else did. And while I was waiting, I assigned projects to my other cities, and “accidentally” achieved the economic victory on some random turn when a city finished a factory or something. I’m still not sure exactly what triggered the victory, since I just got a mostly-static victory screen and a game over.

I think this ties into my even bigger problem with the game, which is the choice to separate leaders from civilizations, and divide every game of Civilization 7 into three distinct ages. I have a sense of why I believe it was done: I think it was intended to impose some kind of semi-realistic narrative structure onto the game, instead of every game being hours and hours of repetitive game mechanics.

And it’s ironic that I think it backfired completely: by imposing a narrative structure onto the game instead of trying to encourage the narrative to fall out of the mechanics, it feels even less capable of emergent narratives than the previous installments were.

Civilization 7 Is Good, Actually?

Who are you going to believe?

Civilization 7 has been getting some pretty dreadful buzz around the internet, and I was happy to hear it. I’ve got a life to lead, and I can’t be devoting it to a huge time-suck on the scale of the Civilization games, so I’d have been glad to skip it. Civ 6 never really clicked for me, so maybe the series and I could finally have an amicable break-up.

Besides, even if all the bugs and UI issues that I’d been hearing about were fixed, there are still basic design decisions that sounded horrible to me. In particular, the two most fundamental design changes: separating the game into three distinct ages, and separating the leaders from the civilizations. If there’s one thing that makes this series, it’s the novelty of having, e.g. George Washington lead the United States from ancient pre-history into the space age. A Civilization game without that feels like a Sims game without plumbobs or kitchen fires.

But the problem is that it’s really pretty. I actually loved the cartoonish character designs of Civ 6¹, so I didn’t need them to go more photo-realistic with the art direction, but I think they struck a really good balance with the new look. It’s stylized enough for the characters to have personality, but in environments that are overall realistic enough that they feel more like a world map than a play set.

I figured that to get around my FOMO, I’d just go back and play Civilization 5 again, since it’s probably my favorite in the series.² That — unsurprisingly — backfired, since it ate up most of a day and just put me in the mindset of wanting to play the latest and greatest.

1
And as I’ve said before: Civ 6’s version of Phillip II of Spain can get it.
2
Or maybe 3, since it was the installment that really got me hooked.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Joysticks

Two of the most joyful tunes in video game music

The Dreamcast is the console I most associate with “Video Game Soundtracks That Rock My Body Til Canada Day,” mostly because of the core memory of being at an E3 and hearing “Mexican Flyer” start up at the Space Channel 5 booth.

But I was a little surprised tonight to discover that the two video game songs that make me the absolute happiest aren’t actually from the Dreamcast.

“Funky Dealer” by Hideki Naganuma is actually from the Jet Set Radio Future soundtrack, which was an Xbox title. I just remember having a CD-R with a ton of ill-gotten Sega music on it, and this was the absolute highlight.

But the most absolutely joyful song in video game history is, of course, “Katamari on the Rocks,” from the soundtrack to Katmari Damacy. If you can listen to the first 60 seconds of that track and not be grinning from ear to ear, feeling like the King of all Cosmos, then you have a cold dead heart and I do not wish to know you.

I said good day, sir.

What If… Nothing Was Different?

Thoughts on the new “What If…?” app and other immersive experiences for the Vision Pro, and revisiting some old assumptions about interactive storytelling

Today I went through¹ the new What If…? app from Marvel and ILM for the Vision Pro. It’s an interesting and extremely well-made mash-up of the animated series, some light minigames, and the “immersive” format that Apple is pushing with the visionOS platform.

I think it’s currently one of the best examples of what the platform is capable of.

People more cynical than me could probably dismiss it as just another VR experience, just like they insisted that the Vision Pro is just a fancy VR headset and Apple doesn’t want you to say that! I still think that the differences are subtle, but significant. You could absolutely bring the What If app to another mixed-reality headset, and you could even bring it to a pure VR headset without losing much. But I believe it would feel like an inferior port.

It’s designed to fit in perfectly with how (I think) Apple is positioning their headset. In particular: it’s a seated, “lean back” experience, feeling more like an animated series with interactive elements than a simplified game with extended cut-scenes. It also uses gesture controls as its only interface, having you grab infinity stones, fling objects around, fire magic bolts, hold shields, and open portals using only your hands. (Tying it into Doctor Strange and having your guide be Sorcerer Supreme Wong was an inspired choice).

1
Watched? Played? :shudder: Experienced? The lack of useful verbs is still a problem when trying to talk about interactive entertainment

Half-Life: Alyx is not an immersive life sim

How the Half-Life series has all the ingredients of a perfect VR game and then subverts most of them

Valve released a new Steam Link app for the Quest headsets that lets you play wirelessly connected to a PC running your Steam library. At least with my particular home setup (Quest 2 connected via WiFi to a Windows machine in a different room connected via Ethernet), it runs flawlessly.

This is pretty huge, since it removes one last bit of friction that’s kept me from playing Steam VR games for a very long time. There’s not really enough space to play VR games comfortably in the room with my PC. And the whole process of starting up Steam VR with a physical USB connection was always more than a little clunky, especially compared to the just-pick-it-up-and-turn-it-on nature of the Quest¹.

Now there are only a couple of stumbling blocks left: I never have time to play games anymore, and I’m so bad at them that experiences designed to last a few hours will for me stretch out over months or even years.

On that note: I always imagined I’d write about Half-Life: Alyx once I’d finished the game, or at least gotten farther than the first chapter. But I’m realizing that that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon, partly because I rarely get time to play, partly because of the weird time-dilation in video games caused by my ineptitude, and partly because being trapped in confined spaces with zombies is so creepy that I need to frequently take the headset off and take a break.

But Alyx is the absolute gold standard for VR experiences, easily the best one I’ve played at home and likely even better than location-based stuff like The Void. And it’s tonally perfect for the Half-Life series; in particular, the slow build-up to action, as you’re dropped into a mundane moment in a bizarre world. I think of the series so much as clicks and explosions and gunfire and shrieks and expository speeches and electronic music, that I forget how quiet it often is.

There’s a ton of fascinating stuff that happens before you even encounter your first zombie. And I found myself running out of superlatives for the whole design experience by the first time I fired a pistol.

1
Ironically, the Quest seems to have gotten some updates since I last used it, and they make it kind of clunky and unwieldy to get into the experience. I especially enjoyed how an app designed to demonstrate hand controls would refuse to start up unless I had the controllers.

Super Mario Bros Wonder: The Conversation

Super Mario Bros Wonder is relentlessly delightful and in constant conversation with the player

Super Mario Bros. Wonder is gloves-down the most delightful experience I’ve had playing a game in years. Even by Mario standards, it’s over-stuffed with surprises and moments that had me laughing out loud just from an unnecessarily over-the-top secret discovery.

There was one addition, though, that seemed out-of-place with the franchise, and I wasn’t sure it would work. Throughout the levels, there are flowers that talk to you as your character passes by, in plain, unaffected English¹. They comment on what’s happening, give clues to things you might have missed, or just give you a bit of encouragement before you’re about to pull off a difficult stunt.

Todd Martens has a nice column in The Los Angeles Times about the game, where he says the flowers serve as a recurring source of encouragement and a reminder of the healing power of play. They serve as kind of a bridge between the game and the player, reminding us to appreciate the joyous details the game keeps throwing at us:

I’ve returned, for instance, throughout my playthrough to an early level featuring a bounty of Piranha Plants, those chomping, polka-dotted, Mario-biting flora that have long been a staple of the series. Only here, they walk, and at one point in the level can break into song. “They’re singing!” exclaims our flower pal, and indeed they are, with a high-pitched, childlike voice. […] It’s an easy, early level, but I revisit it because it never fails to make me smile, and it serves as a reminder that the so-called ordinary is often extraordinary if we’re willing to pay attention.

He’s absolutely right about the Piranha Plants On Parade level, which is a highlight of the entire 40-year series of Mario games, and which warrants a replay any time you’re feeling even a little bit down.

But the Mario games have always been about fun and surprisingly delightful moments. One of the things that sets Wonder apart is that it’s all about discovering those moments, even more than skill. There’s no timer in the standard levels, for one thing. As a result, there’s a sense that they’re more about exploration than just completion.

1
Or whatever language you’re playing in, I’m assuming.

Sound Mind, or, Committing to the (1) Bit

About my recently-announced game and some recommendations for other Playdate games

Wednesday morning, Panic ran a Playdate Update video that previewed some upcoming games for the platform, including one I’m working on called Sound Mind.

It’s a two-player game where you play as siblings fighting over your father’s inheritance. On your turn, you’re trying to find the bag of money and keep it all for yourself. Then you hand the Playdate to your opponent, and your character is frozen helplessly in place, while your sibling is trying to steal back the money for themselves. You can’t see what they’re doing, but you can hear every step and every movement.

The idea for the game came during a road trip down to southern California while we were getting ready to move. At a car charging stop, my fiancé was playing with the Playdate. I couldn’t see what he was doing, but the device has a pretty great speaker, so I could hear every bit of it. And the sound effects were distinctive enough that I could piece together a reasonably accurate image of what he was doing.

Since 2023 was supposed to be the year of my glorious voluntary unemployment, I thought I’d be able to casually finish up this game in just a few months without even breaking a sweat.¹ Then I had to go and ruin everything by getting a full-time job. My pace has slowed way down, but I’m still plugging away at it to be released next year.

I submitted a bunch of ideas² to Panic, and I suspect they’re more perceptive than I am at seeing the potential in a half-baked idea. As I’ve been working on Sound Mind, it’s kind of gone from just a novelty to something that fits in well with what I think is the whole gestalt of the Playdate: it’s kind of a weird idea that wouldn’t work as well anywhere else, it’s a fairly simple concept that’s going to succeed or fail in the execution, and the platform itself is small and lo-fi enough that there’s room for me to get goofy.

So I can fill it with homages to Edward Gorey and extremely dated references to 1970s horror movies, for instance, and I don’t have to look at anybody’s stinkface reaction that it’s too niche to be marketable.³

Plus I can’t say enough what a fan I am of Panic. Everybody I’ve dealt with has been surprisingly and unnecessarily nice and supportive, without exception. And I’ve been grateful for their patience, as they’re a lot more laid back than it seems like a company that’s so famously detail-oriented could get away with being.

Or to put it more simply: come for the crank, stay for the supportive environment and platform that favors novelty and creativity and seeks to empower people to make cool stuff.

And finally, here are some game recommendations for the Playdate, since it’s been a while since I’ve made any. (This isn’t in any way exhaustive, since I’ve had very little time to play anything, so I only catch about 5% of what’s out there).

1
Honestly, I was well aware my schedule was comically over-ambitious, but I wanted to try and keep myself on task.
2
Well, okay, four
3
Hypothetically speaking.

There Is No Triforce

I finish my first Legend of Zelda game and commit heresy against the franchise

When I was a freshman in college, I was trying to make a point in English Literature class by comparing a character to Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye. The teacher of the class casually responded that she didn’t get the comparison because she’d never read The Catcher in the Rye. I remember feeling an all-new-for-me combination of disappointment, condescension, and pity that to this day I hope didn’t show on my face.

To be clear: I wouldn’t have that reaction now. While the book influenced me a ton when I read it¹, there’s no reason to suspect it would even appeal to a lot of readers, much less that it would have the same impact for most people that it did on me². But as a smug seventeen year old, I knew with an unshakeable conviction that the book was a modern classic that should be required reading for anyone who claimed to be at all literate.

I mention all that for two reasons: first, I feel like the “video game community” as a whole, as much as it can agree on anything, would agree that The Legend of Zelda series has a similar position of reverence and importance for video games as an art form.

Second, in all my years of playing video games, I’ve never been able to finish a Zelda game. And I suspect that kind of admission would trigger the same feeling of disappointment and pity in a lot of players.

But! In a new development, I’ve just finished my first entry in the series. The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, which was originally for the GameBoy. It’s the one game in the series that I have bought three times: the original, the GameBoy Color version, and the Switch remake³.
I’ve been told several times over the years that it’s a perfect introduction not just to Zelda but to RPGs in general, since it’s compact compared to the mainline games but still feels like a moderately epic My First Adventure.

I’ve got to object to the idea that this is a Baby Game for Babies, though. The story is quite juvenile, but the puzzles are baffling, and the boss fights are infuriating. Combined with the other Zelda games I’ve played, it makes it clear what really is the defining aspect of this series: instead of being RPGs that have been streamlined and had more arcadey elements added, like I’d always believed, they’re actually arcade⁴ action games that borrow thematic elements from RPGs. I’m sure I’m not the first person to point out that Link’s Awakening is structured more like a Metroid game than like any other RPG I’ve ever seen.

There were several times that I had to consult a walkthrough, and I rarely felt as if the solution was something I would’ve figured out if I’d had more patience. More often than not, it was arbitrary — like the sleeping powder is the only thing that will work against this particular enemy, even though there’s nothing that telegraphs that — and I would need a kid’s patience and endless free time to experiment with solutions until I stumbled onto the right one.

More often than that, though, I had figured out what the solution for a dungeon room or a boss fight was, but I couldn’t execute on it. There are repeated puzzles where you have to drive a moving walkway to fill in a bottomless pit to “solve” the room. It’s extremely clever the first time you encounter it, but by the time you have to do it the third time, it’s asking you to fill up an entire room with extremely fiddly controls with no margin for error.

With the boss fights, it was the Mario-inspired standard, repeated over and over again: it wasn’t enough to figure out the solution, but you had to do the same thing several times. Unlike Mario, it rarely required only three hits, but demanded you keep doing it long past the point it became interesting or satisfying.

Now, my objections to this game are largely the result of being a 52-year-old man (who tends to play (and occasionally make) graphic adventure games) bouncing off of a 30-year-old GameBoy game. But looking back at the other Zelda games that I’ve started with high expectations but have never quite been engaged enough to finish, I can see what they all have in common, regardless of scope, and that’s that they’re not really my thing.

I respect the whole aesthetic a ton. The Legend of Zelda series has some of the best music of any video game. The game loop is so elegant and ingenious that it’s a marvel to anybody interested in game design. I can understand why people love these games. And now I can understand why I always start out eager to love them, but bounce off of them a few hours in.

(And to be clear, I’ve played a ton of these games, trying over and over again to find the one that I can appreciate as much as everyone else seems to. I’ve tried every mainline entry since Ocarina of Time, gone back to A Link to the Past, and tried most of the portable entries. Breath of the Wild‘s weapon durability mechanic annoyed me enough that I wasn’t interested in continuing, and I haven’t bothered with Tears of the Kingdom).

Maybe I’m being overly generous to myself, but this feels like a double victory. Not only did I finally finish a Zelda game — and I hardly ever finish any games these days — but I feel like I can finally ignore the conventional wisdom and acknowledge that even outstanding games might not be suited for everyone who loves video games.

1
As a teenager, which is exactly when you’re supposed to read it for maximum effect
2
If I remember correctly, sobbing at the beginning of Chemistry class for reasons I could not explain
3
For the record, I played and finished it on the Switch version after my GBC save game got corrupted
4
However that’s defined at the time

My Perfect Console

What I would choose if I were more famous. And surprisingly, it’s not just “the Sega Dreamcast.”

Lately I’ve been enjoying the podcast My Perfect Console with Simon Parkin, in which he asks guests to choose five video games that have had a particular impact on their lives and/or their careers, and assemble them all into their version of a perfect game console. My favorite entries that I’ve heard so far have been the ones with Jake Solomon and with Phil Wang.

I’m not famous enough to be on the podcast, but I’ve still got a blog and a fervent belief that the internet needs to have my opinions on it. Except I’ve already got a running list of my favorite games going, updated periodically whenever I remember another one and have time to write a blog post.

And I mean, let’s be honest: that’s all the people on that podcast are doing, is making lists of their favorite games. Even if it were a thing for video game consoles to include five games on them, most of the lists that I’ve heard so far wouldn’t make for good console games. Cool that some Infocom text adventure from 1985 forever changed your perception of how interactive narrative can work, but nobody’s playing that on a console without a keyboard and mouse.

It’s almost as if they chose a format best suited to thoughtful discussion on a podcast, instead of an actual “perfect console!”

Anyway, I aim to fix that. Here’s a list of the five games I’d choose. They aren’t necessarily my favorites, but they’re the games that had a big impact on me and would be ideal for including on a home video game console.

My Favorite Games: Morrowind

You’ve been having strange dreams, Outlander?

Featured image is taken from the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages wiki

The Elder Scrolls III was my first game in the series, and probably the first time I got completely engrossed in an RPG. I’d played Final Fantasy 7 and Final Fantasy Tactics by that point, two games whose mechanics I’d loved, but the stories were overwrought and confounding.

I’d also played Might and Magic VI, and enjoyed it a lot, but I thought it was about as generic a fantasy RPG as you could possibly get. And I adored Final Fantasy IX, but it felt strangely like borrowing other people’s nostalgia — I could never shake the feeling of how all of it would be so wonderful and familiar to people who grew up playing JRPGs, but since I never did, I felt like I was kept an arm’s length away from being entirely absorbed.

But Morrowind hooked me completely: story, setting, mechanics, visuals, everything.

It’s extremely rare for me to finish any video game, much less super-long ones, but I felt like leaving Morrowind unfinished simply wasn’t an option. I had to see what happened. Even though the last third of the game is an extremely tedious slog through a volcanic wasteland in the middle of an ash storm, and I was tempted to abandon it so many times.

I’ve got two key memories of Morrowind that help explain why it made such a huge impact on me.

My Favorite Games: Half-Life 2

The video game that fundamentally changed how I think about video games

To manage expectations: I don’t have any new epiphanies about Half-Life 2 or anything, but I’ve been seeing lists of people’s favorite or most influential video games going around, and it occurred to me that I forgot to add Half-Life 2 to my own running list. The problem is that I forget about Half-Life 2 simply because it had such an impact on me; it seems as trivial to say that I like it as it would be to say that I like chocolate or puppies.

It’s no exaggeration to say that this game changed how I think about video games, and what I think they’re capable of.

Until I played it, I’d been perfectly happy with the hard divisions between games that had become calcified over the years, to the point where I believed that different aspects were inherently mutually exclusive. You can have a well-written cinematic story… but at the expense of action. You can have puzzles… at the expense of pacing. You can have systems-based game mechanics… at the expense of direction and “authorship.” Half-Life 2 just said, “Nah, we want all of it.”

The Worst Jedi

Being tragically bad at video games means getting stories with bad pacing

One thing to know about me is that I’m extremely bad at video games. Whoever was making my character neglected to put any points into dexterity, so I’m pretty hopeless at anything that requires quick reflexes or precise hand-eye coordination.

(You might think it’s weird to spend most of your career working in video games if you’re bad at them, but I’d counter that most of the games I’ve worked on have been more modest, story- and puzzle-driven adventure games. You might then go on to assume that I must be better at adventure games, then, but I have to say that I’m bad at those, too).

I’ve been reminded of how bad I am at games, brutally and repeatedly, because I’ve gotten the chance to put some more time into Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order over the past few days.