Listen to the Rain

This is the divisive one.

I didn't own a PS1, so I didn't play the PS1-era Final Fantasy games until later--Final Fantasy IX in 2002, Final Fantasy VIII in 2006, and Final Fantasy VII never--but my friends in high school did and so I was peripherally involved in the wars over its quality. uriany hated the game, especially the draw mechanic, and made sure to mention it every time it was brought up. fiendishfanfares loved the story and the characters, and did her best to defend it. I had never played the game so I had no opinion, but the Great Final Fantasy VIII Wars are one of the memories I have of high school.

I first played the game years later and I liked it well enough, but there were still some problems that prevented me from really enjoying it. The way the story kept taking sudden right turns, and the way that magic worked, and the strange difficulty scaling, but I appreciated the Retro Future Art Noveau setting and the focus on character interactions. Years passed, I studied Japanese, and when the Axe of the Blood God podcast and the Square Roots podcast both picked FFVIII as their next game I knew that I needed to play along. Would I enjoy FFVIII as much as fiendishfanfares had if I played it in the original language?

It took me months to finish because there is a lot of text in this game, but I finally see what the fans love about it, even if I can't agree that it's wholely loveable.


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Here are all the games I beat in 2020, in chronological order:

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Even more so than for A Realm Reborn I'm not entirely sure how to review this. My previous experience of an MMO, I started at the beginning--or nearly so, at patch 1.8 of World of Warcraft--and stayed on the train for years until I finally left in patch 4.2 during Cataclysm. I could have reviewed each expansion as it came and talked about how Balance Druid startd out terrible, became good but not great during Burning Crusade, truly blossomed in Wrath of the Lich King, and then slid down a bit in Cataclysm while also talking about how the story was nonsense the entire time. I can't do that for Heavensward. There was one major patch while I was playing, patch 5.4, that reworked the monk and added more raids to Shadowbringers, but I'm not in Shadowbringers and I still don't have monk unlocked. I can't talk about tactical points, the original Ishgardian Restoration, mana management, astrologian card priority, or anything else that was a major point of Heavensward because by the time I joined they were all gone.

As such, a lot of this review will be about the storytelling, which is the part that everyone really praises Heavensward for. I heard so often while I was playing ARR that Heavensward was where the story really picks up, just wait for Heavensward, if you have any feels for the game now you don't even know what awaits you in Heavensward, over and over again from everyone. I tried to avoid letting cynicism or hipster dislike take hold and I'm glad I did, because I'm here to report that Heavensward is one of the best Final Fantasy stories ever committed to ones and zeroes. That does mean that from here on, there will be massive spoilers, because I can't really talk about what makes it amazing without discussing the story's twists and turns. You have been warned.


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I thought I was done with MMOs forever, but sashagee pulled me back in.

I followed the original development of Final Fantasy XIV haphazardly, mostly reading about how it was likely to be a disaster. At the time I was playing World of Warcraft and had no intention to switch, so I watched from the outside as the development ran into a bunch of roadblocks, the zones were empty cut-and-paste jobs, the gameplay was boring at best and infuriating at worst, the art team spent as much time and effort making a flowerpot as they did a player character model, and a private stockholder sold his entire 1% holding of Square-Enix in response to how terrible the game was in possibly the most epic ragequit in gaming history. But to their credit, Square-Enix didn't give up. Back then, every game was either World of Warcraft, or wanted to kill World of Warcraft, and they always came to one of two ends--they were World of Warcraft, or they died. Warhammer: Age of Reckoning, Wildstar, Tabula Rasa, Rift, all years in development and all gone now. Many others went free-to-play and scaled down their ambitions drastically. Somehow, Square-Enix threaded the needle and made gold out of dross. They made the game totally free, shut it down, and then restarted it, hence, "A Realm Reborn."

I went to Distant Worlds back in 2014 when they played "Answers" and showed the cutscene, and I kept seeing articles here and there on gaming websites I followed. The first one to really get my attention was about a phantom train and Kefka raid based on Final Fantasy VI, but by that point I had been done with MMOs for years. schoolpsychnerd wasn't nearly as in to video gaming as she used to be, and what's the point of playing an MMO by yourself, even if it is as story-heavy as FFXIV was supposed to be. But the whole time, I kept hearing the it was the best Final Fantasy of this millennium, and I thought that one day, I'd get to it.

Well, I got to it.


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People talk online about how Super Mario Bros. 2 took the Mario series in a bizarre direction after the template set in Super Mario Bros. before Nintendo brought it back in Super Mario Bros. 3, but they don't really talk about how things immediately went sideways again. After Super Mario Bros. 3 had fireballs and stomping on enemies again and got rid of the life bar, Super Mario Land made things weird again. Superballs instead of fireballs? Exploding koopanokobons? Side-scrolling shooter stages? "Princess Daisy"? What is happening?

What is happening is that since this was a Game Boy game, it was worked on by Yokoi Gunpei instead of Miyamoto Shigeru, so Super Mario Land is a window into an alternate world where the team that designed Metroid and Game & Watch was the originator of the world's most famous video game character. If that had happened, maybe Mario would have starred in a series of best-selling danmaku games? Maybe the traditional Mario stage would have been a riff off a real-world location rather than being totally fantastical. Maybe Miyamoto would have designed Metroid.

A world as different from our own as Sarasaland is from the Mushroom Kingdom.


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Hey, remember going outside? That was pretty cool, right? At least, in theory--right now I'm sitting in my sun nook and watching snow come down furiously outside my window, which means that Fool's Spring is over and winter has returned to Chicago. At least until tomorrow, when it'll be 13° C out. Welcome to the Midwest--other places have four seasons, and so do we, we just have them over the course of twenty-four hours.

I first heard of A Short Hike when meowtima played through it a couple weeks ago, so I put it on my wish list. Then a week or so ago it went on sale, and after waffling over it for a couple days I bought it. aaron.hosek had bought it at the same time, and we fired it up at the same time. He works for Chicago Public Schools so he has more free time than me right now and beat it first, and came back into our group chat and said it was a masterpiece. And especially now, in the Plague Year when life is not super great, I agree. Get this game.


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I first learned about Project Warlock through one of the few parts of game streamer culture I actually participate in, the Continue? Show. I've been watching them for six years now and have seen almost everything game-related they put out, so when they posted a video about a retro-styled PC shooter I'd never heard of, one that reminded me a lot of a modernized version of Catacomb Abyss mixed with Doom, I immediately put it on my wishlist. And when it went on sale, I bought it. Especially when I saw someone online describe it as "Hexenstein 3D," since I've played two of those three references and loved both of them. I don't really like playing modern first-person shooters because the more realistic the violence gets the less I want to play it--this is true of other game genres as well, but it comes out strongest in first-person shooters and fighting games--but pixel games? Bring it on.

End result? It was pretty good, but I do wonder if I should have played Hexen or Heretic instead.


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When I first heard of Untitled Goose Game, I didn't get any of hype. I figured that it would be a flash-in-the-pan dumb meme game like Goat Simulator or Octodad, where a deliberately-overtuned physics engine leads to ridiculous antics, good for watching on Twitch while you scroll through Twitter on your phone but not actually interesting to play for more than ten minutes, so I stopped paying any attention to it other than seeing people mention it occasionally or the articles that the gaming sites I read posted. And then it came out and all of a sudden the memes were everywhere. Friends whose taste I trusted were posting them and talking about how much they loved playing the game. People were changing their profile photos to the goose. Well-known memes like Smudge the Cat came out in Untitled Goose versions. The goose was, if you'll excuse the phrase, in the air.

In the midst of all this, thosesocks messaged me one afternoon and told me that the previous night, she had gone to a party and had ducked into a side room where people were playing Untitled Goose Game. She had a bunch of fun with the playing-in-a-group format, and so she asked me if I had a Switch and, when I said yes, asked if I wanted to play Untitled Goose Game game with her because she could use some stress-relieving goose antics. She offered to buy me dinner to reimburse me for the cost of the game, I accepted, and so while we chatted and ate dinner, the game downloaded, and then we booted it up and started to play.

My initial impressions of the game were totally wrong. It's just as great as the awards and memes say it is.


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A game of blowing up colonizers with lightning storms.

Yesterday was the renewal of tom.hen.12's board game afternoons at Dice Dojo, which is now five minutes' walk from my home. So I had no excuse at all, and when 2 p.m. rolled around I showed up just in time for him to say they were playing Spirit Island. None of the other people I invited could come, but Spirit Island is for 2-4 players and we had four, so it all worked out.

Spirit Island takes place on an unnamed island where you all play spirits of the land, worshipped by the native Dahan, who now have to defend the island from invading colonists who want to take all the resources, kill the Dahan, poison the land, and otherwise ruin everything. Each spirit has its own particular playstyle and abilities--I was playing Vital Strength of the Earth, who was slow to build up their full strength and often had to play actions in advance because they took a while to take effect, but ImpishFarainite was playing Lightning's Swift Strike, who could act very quickly but wasn't as powerful again large groups of colonizers. There were quite a few more spirits, but A Spread of Rampant Green, my initial choice, was missing a necessary card, and several spirits were high complexity and we didn't want to get too overwhelmed.

Here's the board:


In the center there is the island. The white (heh) miniatures are the colonizers, consisting of explorers, settlements, and cities. Each turn explorers appear in one terrain type, the colonizers expand their settlement in places they're occupying, and then they ravage the land, causing Blight (the small grey circles) and destroying Presence (the colored circles). Spirits act twice, once before the invader phase with fast actions, and once after it with slow actions. The native Dahan are the wood-colored mushroom-shaped tokens.

Actions vary enormously depending on the spirit. As Vital Strength of the Earth, I had the ability to reduce the damage the colonizers caused in any place where I had two Presence, but in the beginning I could only act once per turn and I had to choose between gaining new abilities and restoring previously-played abilities to my hand, so I had to do a lot of planning in advance. In addition, I could only add Presence to somewhere very close to where I already had Presence, and many of my actions were only effective on areas either where I had two Presence or near where I had two Presence. On the other hand, tom.hen.12 was playing Shadows Flicker Like Flame, who couldn't do much against parge concentrations of colonizers at all but was good at causing Fear, and who could relatively quickly spread Presence.

I've heard Spirit Island described as "Pandemic with people"--including by tom.hen.12 after our game--but I haven't played Pandemic so I can't actually speak to that. But the colonizers were definitely equivalent to a creeping infection that we had to manage. I used Vital Strength of the Earth's defensive powers to destroy anyone who was in my lands and occasionally colonizers that were driven there by the others, Shadows Flicker Like Flame caused a bunch of Fear to keep the invaders on terrified and killed off lone explorers, Lightning's Swift Strike kept smashing settlements and used their powers to increase the speed on our actions, and pejohnson2's River Surges in Sunlight covered the wetlands and coasts due to their ability to treat any Presence on wetlands as double, allowing the rest of us to focus more inland. All spirit turns take place simultaneously and spirits are cooperating against the colonizers, so we had a lot of turns where we'd debate what to do, think about actions, plan out "I do this then you do this so that I can" kind of scenarios, and then we'd go to the invader turn and hope for the best.

The whole game is a slow ramp up into chaos. At the beginning, there are only a few colonizers and they spread slowly, which is good, because the spirits are sluggish and capable of only limited actions within a small sphere of influence. As the colonizers grow more and more numerous, the spirits ramp up their power--where as at the beginning I could only more colonizers or Dahan around or kill a couple explorers (one per turn), by the end I was planning out a poison all the colonizers in this space, then call Dahan to war and shatter this city, and then move those Dahan to a neighboring area where I had Presence so that they could kill the explorers there during the Ravage phase. Meanwhile, the other three spirits were all planning similarly-complex actions. It was impossible for one of us to take over because we all had our own complex plans to manage. ImpishFarainite had played before, but at one point basically said, "I can't tell you what to do, I have to manage my own plans and can't play two spirits" and that was very good. The complexity gives every player enough to handle and prevents one person from becoming general and the rest of from becoming minions. We all had plenty to do.

The final mechanic I haven't mentioned is Fear. Certain spirit actions generates Fear. Enough Fear triggers a Fear card, which has effects like the colonizers executing some of their own as scapegoats, or their attacks having reduced effects, or otherwise suffering damage. Creating Fear is the way to win, since enough Fear means the colonizers decide that their colonization isn't worth it and they pull out. In the beginning, the spirits have to kill every single colonizer on the island to win, but every three Fear cards reduces this to every settlement and city, and then every city, and then just outright victory. On the verge of being overrun, we unlocked the "kill every city Fear level and managed to shatter six invader cities in a single turn and pull off a win, even though half the island was blighted.

It was a bunch of fun! I love cooperative games that don't devolve into the person who has played before telling everyone what to do, and where the players actually have to discuss and plan out their actions before taking them rather than just all acting individually but ostensibly toward the same goals. And we only played four of the spirits--I'd love to get a chance to actually play with A Spread of Rampant Green, and tom.hen.12 mentioned he wanted to try someone other than Shadows Flicker Like Flame. Now that I've played at least once and did really well, I think I could handle a higher-complexity spirit.

It's nice to get back into board gaming.

So after a whole weekend of partying and staying up late, I came back to Chicago and...immediately decided to to go to a late-night showing of Blade Runner. I mean, now it's an alternate history movie (as of just under a week ago)! I had to see it while it was still on the bleeding edge of the future.

Also, the whole audience laughed when this came on the screen:


This showing was the Final Cut, which I've never seen before. The last time I saw Blade Runner was as a university student, when jdcohen and jmenda were astonished that I'd never seen it, so we piled into a disused conference room in Stouffer House along with t3chnomag3, meistert, and some other people I've fallen out of contact with and watched the theatrical release on a projector. As soon as the voice over started, jmenda audibly groaned. I didn't know what I was missing, but I thought it was pretty good.

This was all before I started describing my aesthetic as "cyberpunk elf" or "an extra from Blade Runner."

So that was my half-remembered experience when I went into Blade Runner this time, and I was surprised how much was the same and how much was different. For one, it's not all just Japanese in the background! There's a lot of Chinese too, and occasionally Russian and Spanish. Los Angeles of 2019 is more diverse than the derivative material gives it credit for. This time I did understand the brief bit of Japanese, when the noodle vendor welcomes Deckard and then tells him that two is plenty (二つで充分ですよ！) when he tries to order four fish. There's a Japanese comic about it here that answers the question "What is Deckard ordering and why are they arguing about numbers?"

I forgot how weirdly disjointed the movie was. I can kind of see why the studio execs wanted to add a voice over, though the movie is clearly better without it. There's a lot of confusing shots of rain-slick streets, empty buildings, crowds who almost completely ignore everything going on around them, and scenes with no dialogue and barely any action. It does a lot to immerse you in a world of future shock, where everything is weird and strange and what does it mean to be human--or as my brain insists on search-replacing that with, "What is a man?"--but I was sometimes relying on my memory of what the movie was about rather than what was actually happening on the screen.

I also love all the design aesthetics. The use of chiaroscuro, with the darkness everywhere occasionally lit by flashes of bright light, and the way there are a lot of "unnecessary" details on everything. Deckard's dingy apartment has a bunch of large blocks set together like bricks and almost bas-relief-like murals all throughout. And all the asymmetricality! The apartment is laid out strangely, the clothes have extra curlicues on them, and even the whiskey glasses Deckard drinks out of are strangely designed, as is the bottle of whiskey. A bunch of my clothes are asymmetrical like that now, because apparently that's the cyberpunk aesthetic, I assume entirely due to this movie.

I also completely forgot the middle section, much like when I reread Neuromancer a couple years ago, but I'm not sure if there were any scenes added to it for the Final Cut. And I appreciate how the Final Cut also hints slightly more strongly that Deckard is a replicant, but still leaves everything up in the air.

(I know about Blade Runner 2049, but I haven't seen it)

I'm really glad I went to see it again, since it had been so long and now I'm in a much better mindset to appreciate it, and at the perfect time to do so, too! Now I just need to wait thirty years and then go see Blade Runner 2049 before I die in the Water Wars.

This isn't the first Kirby game I ever played--that honor goes to Kirby's Dream Land, which I played for a few minutes on a friend's GameBoy--but it is the first Kirby game I ever beat! I played it as a university student, when unlimited high-speed internet opened up the world of games that I had totally missed out due to not paying attention to console gaming past the 16-bit era. I don't even remember why I wanted to play Kirby's Adventure, honestly, nor why I found Kirby Super Star and played that. My days as a Kirby super-fan only came very recently, so it's not like I was seeking out every piece of Kirby-related media before then.

Nonetheless it stuck with me because Kirby's Adventure is a fun game in its own right. Kirby games have a reputation of being easy, and mostly it's deserved, with the difficulty found in the alternate objectives and extra modes. Still, I found Kirby's Adventure pretty tricky at points, especially a couple of the boss battles, and I was glad that the game threw lives at me like crazy. There were times when I needed them.


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Thank you Rock Paper Shotgun for so frequently informing me of the existence of games like this.

It's inarguable that Doom is one of the most important games ever made, up there with Pong or Minecraft. The mark of a device's technical sophistication--or perhaps the technical expertise of their users--is whether Doom will run on it. And I could probably spend the rest of my life playing Doom mods and never have to play the same thing twice. The sheer variety of maps out there is dizzying, and once I make playing Doom my job and somehow finished all the maps, there's plenty of full conversions out there like Chex QuestSimon's Destiny. I could turn these reviews I write into nothing but reviews of Doom mods and maps and still have plenty of material.

Well, and Zelda games. Don't want to completely give everything else up.

I'm mostly kidding. The Doom engine has a lot of limitations like not being able to handle true 3D spaces--areas can have different Z-levels, but it's not really possible for two things to be on top of each other--and clearly being designed for a game where a space marine runs around confronting the forces of Hell with a shotgun. So how well would a game that's based on slow, deliberate movement mixed with melee combat work as source material?

Better than I expected.


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