So, like, in Metal Gear Solid 2, there’s this guy who attached another guy’s arm to his very much arm-free elbow. The transplant apparently included a hidden extra: the spirit of a dead terrorist who’s the genetically identical twin of this guy’s sworn enemy. Ghost terrorist – using this guy’s body – then steals a giant, sea-faring robot that makes animal noises right from under the nose of the US military.
Showing posts with tag: featured
no comments
Remedy has accomplished something so many before have failed to do: craft a world that feels consistently inconsistent, a place governed by a set of rules far, far beyond our mortal comprehension. Rules we can feel but never truly know.
That feeling — that sense you can nearly almost define the world of Control but not quite — is the enigmatic engine that drives Remedy’s latest.
no comments
Video games used to be a meditative experience. It was just you and the box, with controller and cord as the connective tissue. Those thoughts — those pesky mental constructs — vanished to the experience in the moment.
It’s why there’s a soothing silence to consoles of yore. It’s you and its world — or it’s you and its world and the friend sitting next to you. It’s a date who leaves their phone in the car or, more aptly, doesn’t have a phone at all. Those sixth-generation start-up screens were the lights dimming in a movie theatre, a vacation with email switched off.
no comments
Everything is changing. The advent of COVID-19 is transforming how we live now — and how we might live for years to come. The world we knew yesterday won’t be the world we know tomorrow.
no comments
Halo then: a word that asked a thousand questions. Halo now: a word that answers far, far more. In 2001, Halo: Combat Evolved introduced a gameplay sandbox unlike no other — one that extended beyond the linear hallways of its corridor-crawling siblings. The premise: use its arsenal of weapons and vehicles to forge your own path on developer Bungie’s intergalactic highway — go where they want, but have some small say in how you get there.
That highway was an ancient one, too. A storytelling sandbox littered with vast monoliths and symbology of a civilization no longer with us.
And it was full of unanswered questions.
no comments
Legend of Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto famously said the series was inspired by a childhood exploring forests and caves.
That freedom, seemingly without supervision or shepherd, is arguably the cornerstone of Zelda’s NES success, a game that went on to shift millions of cartridges. It seems no coincidence, then, that Breath of the Wild draws heavily from those origins — and ended up as perhaps one of the most successful open-world games in years.
But why is this formula so successful in Breath of the Wild?
Because it’s about the story you choose to tell, not the story you’re told.
It’s here that Zelda returns to source, crafting an experience that feels not unlike childhood — or, at least, the idealisation of childhood: open and free of expectations, giving you the time to grow into challenges to come. It’s a return to a time when the world was a series of unknowns, with immense pleasure found in their exploration. It’s why Breath of Wild is such a memorably forgettable game — because very little actually happens. Every second of gameplay is the consequence of a decision you made a moment before. Not the result of prescribed events — dungeons, shrines, cut scenes — which are just a tiny fragment of its running time.
Zelda’s latest could be described as the digital equivalent of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, a series of anecdotes and ‘had-to-be-there’ moments. Stories with meaning only to those who experienced it first hand, bringing with them that sense of the ethereal — those vague memories, snippets of things that happened, but can’t quite remember. Breath of the Wild, for lack of a better word, simply is.
But that ‘is’ isn’t easy to talk about, because it feels entirely unique to you. It’s a unique product of your particular sandbox — one covered in puzzles, goblins and ancient machines.
You can’t talk about the part where that bridge collapses under enemy duress, or the time that thing fell from the sky. These would put the power of exploration back into the hands of the designer — the parent. That thing falling from the sky is an invasion of their prescribed vision.
But you can talk the time you knocked yourself off the side of a snow-covered mountain with a well-intentioned, poorly-placed bomb, or the time Fido the horse ate laser beam once too many.
Small memories, brief recollections of those fleeting, ethereal moments.
Breath of the Wild is loyal to its namesake, a game that simply lets you be. You’re the writer, director, and actor in an adventure for which Fujibayashi and Aonuma provided the stage and props — and that’s often what childhood felt like at its best. You were your own hero, using everyday items to paint a heroic picture entirely unique to you — and rarely accessible to others.
Breath of the Wild consumed seventy hours of my life. Childhood consumed more than a decade of the rest — little can I say about either. What I can say, though, is exactly how both made me feel: frightened, confused, overwhelmed, thrilled and intrepid, to name just a few.
It’s an approach that almost defies definition. All too often, we judge an experience by what it aspires to be. A horror game that isn’t scary is a failure; a competitive shooter without the respective online infrastructure can’t be deemed truly competitive. Zelda’s open-ended world imbues it with a dreamlike quality, a world where hours pass by in an adventure almost entirely of your own making.
Things feel temporary. Tasks in the world aren’t foisted upon you with dozens upon dozens of map markers. If you can see it, you mark it yourself. You have to discover it. Its weapons, too, are as fleeting and fragile as the memories the game helps you forge. A few hits and your weapon implodes — then back off into the world you go to find another to replace it. To push you out into the open world, Breath of the Wild is forever reluctant to make you feel too comfortable for too long — because that would make setting a defined path a little too easy. Not unlike Miyamoto’s description of his childhood, who had to ‘create his own media to have fun’, with his imagination emboldened by a lack of modern conveniences.
And when you do become comfortable, that straight path eventually emerges: kill Calamity Ganon.
It’s difficult to reprimand Zelda for not living up to a category or a checklist of what it tries to be — because that’s for you to decide. But as many have said, Breath of the Wild’s allure diminishes with time. This is a game littered with magical micro moments, a series of haikus told in quick succession. But with each hour of play, a new moment replaces an old one, leaving you with the existential feeling that, despite saving the world, you haven’t really done all that much. These micro moments quickly become passing memories that are quickly lost to the hours upon hours of open-world meandering.
Again, I can’t quite remember exactly how I saved the world — but I can remember exactly how it made me feel. In the last five games I played, I can remember every enemy placement, every wooden crate and every explosive barrel. But their emotional impact is often secondary to their mechanical and structural composition. Zelda is very much the reverse.
To say Breath of the Wild is the best in its genre is to presume that it tries to reach the height of a well-established standard — that it aims to be the best among many who seek to do the same. Here, though, Zelda has laid a new path through the open, unexplored world of a medium still entrenched in its boyish youth.
Like the series namesake, too, replays of Breath of the Wild feel like a legend passed down, as its open-world pulls you in every and any direction each time you play. Each experience familiar, but not quite how you remember.
And as Miyamoto heads towards his ‘seventieth hour’, it’s impossible — along with those who toiled over Breath of the Wild and games before it — to imagine a world without The Legend of Zelda, a series that continues to grow — still today driven by the memories of its creator, who, in the gaming landscape, is well and truly unforgettable.
no comments
There’s an unavoidable tragedy at the heart of our beloved pastime: games get old — quickly. It’s a testament to the people toiling with pixels, polygons, and processors that games just a few years apart often feel far, far more. These leaps bring the opportunity to update the titles we love — but with that comes the risk of denigrating and debasing what we used to love.
And still do.
This rapid advancement isn’t without potential cost: the abandonment or alteration of some truly historic stuff.
In broad strokes, Square Enix is taking the right approach: re-release a game upscaled for modern displays — with added features introducing something palatable for generations free from nostalgia’s stranglehold. It’s not just a method of preservation and a way of farming Gil on the side, it’s one that seems targeted at encouraging participation — finding a way to encourage the generations of today to visit the games of generations past.
That’s important. Having that history celebrated, preserved, and widely known in a way that’s interactive and entertaining helps to crowdsource that preservation: now thousands, millions have insight into those stories — each person a would-be guardian of some small part of a particular game.
It wonderfully complements the excruciating work of archivists, as covered by OneZero’s Nicole Carpenter. Their goal: to digitize and preserve games and their associated materials for culture’s sake. But with legal issues in the way, it’s not always a surefire way to preserve the memory of these relics in the public consciousness, with a small chance they’ll ever see the light of day again.
Square’s approach is a solid first step towards this ‘preserving through play’ idea. By adding toggles and switches, we can choose how we interface with these historic creations. If you want to experience the title in its close-to-nearest form, you can. If you want to experience the story, you can.
These titles can become digital museums in microcosm, letting us explore their contents in whichever way we want.
That’s something we forget, perhaps: that these are historic creations. Things that earned themselves a place in the pantheon of port-bait. If video games were a religion, something like Final Fantasy VIII might be described as one of its founding texts. If not now, then in decades or centuries to come.
Those achievements are easy to appreciate if you had a front-row seat to their respective decades. But it’s also easy to appreciate that these games might be long-in-the-tooth for some. Couching those dated experiences in developer lore, providing them context, might be the tipping point some need to spend the time in that world. A video game turned entertainment artifact.
Digital museums, then, filled with odes to the history of that game — and its place in video-game cannon. The possibilities are as alluring as they are unending: aural histories, factoids, sales figures, technical details — information in abundance, hidden in the scribbles of some developer’s diary. All that could be preserved alongside the game as it first was, without potential punters retorting to torrents and digital back-alleys.
Not in some blog post or wiki, but married to the experience itself.
If this never happened, speedrunners and archivists help fill that void, becoming those accidental historians. They bring those facts to the table and do one better: explore the original game on original hardware.
There’s also the point of why any of this actually matters. If only in the abstract, video games show the ingenuity of us, accomplishing incredible feats with comparatively little. It only adds to the value for publishers, too. You’re owning a piece of history and the stories around it. Yet another reason to buy in.
More sales, more money, and an onboarding tool for those new to your series. A marketing motif. But as with all things marketing, an exploration of this historical legacy would be born of a corporate mother. Filtered, tamed, and restrained from revealing the true story about its development for fear of looking bad, for fear of soiling the image of a legendary classic.
Yet, time is running out. Those authentic voices, those first-hand stories, and development factoids might lie in the minds of those who made it, who lack the immortality bestowed upon their creations. That’s not to say their tales haven’t been documented — but that there could be even more to tell.
It’s difficult to convey a tangible, monetary value on preserving the history of a medium. What’s popular — and what’s not — might be a marker used to assess our society centuries from now.
Re-releases of old games, even relatively untouched, point to a fundamental truth: the game that worked then, works now — if only just. There’s something in that. Like an old movie with questionable special effects, its continued relevance tells us something about its inherent quality as a work. It’s almost a form of natural selection: games in the vein of ye olde Final Fantasy still sell today — their games are still palatable today, telling us that there’s something worth keeping and bringing forward to the generations to come.
By preserving that memory, you show those who toil and suffer in intense development cycles that their work will and can be remembered. That, even if they aren’t on the front cover, their efforts and stories will outlive them.
And to lose their work, their ideas — either to digital oblivion or a hard drive locked behind legalese — would be a profound tragedy. With lost games go lost seeds, ideas that didn’t quite work but could have. Preserving even the worst of those protects ideas yet to be born, as future gardeners revisit and prune those ideas with new technology and design theory — and go on themselves to create something truly worth preserving: a bloody brilliant video game.