A mostly-games bookpost

[roadrunnertwice]

Time for a bookpost! Well, tbh it's always time for a bookpost, given the state of the queue. But here's the ones I have ready to roll:

Michael Lewis — The Big Short

June 8, 2020

I originally picked this up because I was in a state where I couldn't process fiction very well but figured some trashy nonfiction would go down okay. Which, I was right, but tbh this was almost too trashy.

Well; it was, and it wasn't, depending on what you bring to it. What bugged me was all the goddamn pop-song chord changes in what's properly a doom drone album of a story. But for all that it drove me nuts that he was focusing on these small groups of eccentric personalities using their insight into the massive fraud of '00s capitalism to try and strike it rich, it actually did end up providing an interesting perspective into the sheer scale of banal, bullshit evil that built the rubble-pile of a world we now live in.

My main takeaway was that we should have fucking washed the streets with the blood of the wicked back in 2008.

Bonus Level: Baba is You

April 4, 2020

This is the most satisfying puzzle game I've ever played. It's so well-constructed that it feels like a naturally-occurring object someone found, not a constructed device.

The thing it reminds me most of is Celeste. Totally different game styles, but they share a certain exhaustive rigor — within the boundaries of the mechanics they set up, they really commit to following down EVERY implication and consequence, and if the player follows them the whole way up, they're left with a feeling that they genuinely reached the summit of something.

And good lord, that finale — I can't even express what it felt like to crack through some of those last barriers down there in the Meta. It was like... God himself can't keep me out of here. BABA IS ME.

Anyway, usually I only include story games on this list, and Baba is the opposite of that. But also... sort of... not. Like, there's a certain existentialist vibe to it all, with these named characters whose relationships, proclivities, and fundamental realities keep shifting from level to level (and within each level) based on this totally arbitrary logic grammar. It’s hard to describe the effect, but it’s kind of like if hyperdimensional machine elves tried to create Krazy Kat or Nancy. It gets in your head.

Bonus Level — What Remains of Edith Finch

June 8, 2020

An excellent walking simulator! Good garbage and completely outrageous environments, good acting, rock-solid vibes and feels. And some cool innovation on the formula, with the mixup gameplay in all the family story segments.

It's interesting to compare this and Tacoma as responses to Gone Home. I think they recognize the exact same core strengths/weaknesses of that game, but take different approaches to maximizing/minimizing them:

• Segmentation of the play field made no sense as living space:
  • Tacoma solved this by moving to a profoundly unnatural living space with serious environmental limits, where both the investigator and the absent crew were subject to constant interference and busybodying by corporate overlords.
  • Edith Finch solved it by twisting the absent family into a seriously Gothic horrorshow. Basically, they started with my observation that it seemed like people had been picking up camp and moving to a different section of the house every month and a half and then went like: let's say they actually literally DID; now what kind of people would do that? And then you end up with the sealed-off shrine bedrooms and the constant additions and accretions to the house over time.
• Narration was temporally disconnected and revealed information your character wasn't uncovering from the living space: Gone Home's narration was all excerpts from a written diary that's discovered at the end, because they wanted the game's emotional beats to be performed instead of just dropped. But that messed with the timeline and kind of severed the player from the character by giving them information she doesn't have.
  • Tacoma solved that by framing the performances as actual recordings, presented out of order because they're semi-corrupted and were never meant to be viewed in the first place. (And it did that really cool AR conceit that let you follow those gesture-ghosts around through the 3D space.)
  • Edith Finch solved it by breaking the diaries / artifacts into discrete units that get fully discovered en route, and having them interact with dank family lore that your character already knows (or thinks she knows) parts of. (And it did that really cool mixup thing where you played through Edith's imagination of the moments leading up to each family member's death, changing the controls and gameplay and aesthetic and framing each time.) Oh, and plus it let Edith herself comment a bit more on the proceedings; not necessary in a framing like Tacoma, but valuable here because much of what we observe IS coming from Edith's memories/imagination.

Bonus Level: Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age

Jan 12, 2020

(I missed FFXII completely when it came out because there was a stretch of my 20s where I didn't have any way to play current games.)

All told, I really liked this! I mean, I was predisposed to, just because I love the feel of all the Ivalice/Matsuno games so much, but I think it mostly fulfilled its promises and added up to a satisfying video game, which isn't something I could say about, e.g., FFIX when I replayed it a few years back.

Which isn't to say it's not a bit of a mess! Like pretty much all of the post-SNES FF games (AND many of the earlier ones tbh), twelve's reach very much exceeded its grasp, and its pieces don't fit together seamlessly. The plot is pulled in a bunch of different directions, and it's really obvious that a: they tried to fit too many stories into the box, and b: development of this game went on for a LONG time and ran into some kind of wild troubles along the way. Various plot threads never quite get woven back in, villainous plans don't quite make the amount of sense you'd hope they would, you know the drill.

But while the broader intrigues are a bit of a hash, they at least managed to keep the emotional cores of the story spinning throughout, and I really liked the party! I especially liked how Vaan and Penelo totally do not belong in this story at all, and all the other party members know it.

And I liked the setting, too, although maybe I already said that. Lots of cool cities, lots of cool wildernesses, love it.

The gameplay still works too, I think. This was the one where they tried to bring some lessons from MMOs into a JRPG, and the result aged pretty well — after all, that's kind of what most games are, nowadays. I enjoyed hunting the marks, combat moved fast, and the "gambit" system (where it's basically menu-driven combat, but it moved the "game" part of the game away from inputting commands in the right order and toward programming a set of conditional actions that will result in the right commands in the right order) worked way better than I'd been led to believe from the ancient online discourse I vaguely remembered. Summons were kind of fun — they swung wildly between underpowered and overpowered, never quite feeling properly balanced, but tbh that seems about right with the setting and conceit. You're always taking a risk whipping one out, but maybe it'll pay off this time, you never know.

The "quickening" attacks were the only thing that really felt like they didn't fit the rest of the system at all. They seem like an encouragement to play the game completely the wrong way, and they don't really complement any of the other systems or make any damn sense within the setting. (Isaac told me a story about how, on the original PS2 release, he got perma-stuck a third of the way through because he'd just been cheesing his way through all the boss fights by being really good at chaining the quickening roulette minigame, and eventually hit a wall that he didn't have any other tools for because his characters were all underleveled/underequipped/underdeveloped.)

Graydon Saunders — A Mist of Grit and Splinters

Jan 21

The semi-parallel time-ratchet structure on this one and the diffuse overlap with the last book made it a bit more challenging than the previous books in this series, which maybe is saying something. I'm also still not wholly sure where I'm at w/r/t the various moral arguments that have been simmering in the background but really come to a boil in this one.

Comments

[sporky_rat]

I really loved the original FFXII, it was super enjoyable. I need to dig out my PS2 and see about playing it again.

[roadrunnertwice]

Yeah, the thing I was most surprised by was how good the core gameplay loop felt! Just wandering around and whoopin ass, almost Secret of Mana style. (And the fast-forward button in the remaster was super nice for schlepping through areas I was way overleveled for.)