Listen to the Rain

I heard about Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight on Bonfireside Chat, as a game that was similar to some aspects of the Souls games that they really liked. Then I heard it was a metroidvania game. Well, that's all I need to hear. Sign me up.

I bought it, loaded it up, and took in the beautiful pixel art and moody music. And then I moved forward and was brutally murdered by a chibi with a shield.


A deadly ambush.
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Owlboy is a gorgeous game with great music and a touching story that I can't recommend because it doesn't know what it wants to be.

Owlboy first came to my attention the same way Hyper Light Drifter did, by reading an article on Rock Paper Shotgun about it. A later review cemented it in my mind, with John Walker, who hates everything except puzzle games, gushing over the gameplay and story. And, of course, the art.

Well, I'm not sure how far Walker got into Owlboy. I suspect he never beat it, because if he had, he would have written one of his rants about difficulty preventing his enjoyment of a good game. I did beat it and that's what happened to me. I had nothing but goodwill for Owlboy when I started, but it was slowly worn away by the course of the game, and for the last hour or so I just wanted it to end. And then it finally did, I and I put down the controller, and I deleted the game, and I'm almost certainly never going to play it again.


This game is beautiful, though.
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I still remember the day that I first played Super Mario Bros. 3. My grandparents were visiting, one of the few times they came out to visit rather than having us come to them, and my grandmother had brought a copy of the game just released that year. I had already read all about it in Nintendo Power, and I think to this day it might be the present I have anticipated the most in my entire life. When she gave it to me I literally danced all around the room, yelling "Thank you!" over and over again. Then I sat down with the Nintendo, then plugged in at the TV in the living room, and booted the game up.

It was just as great as I was led to believe. I've never seen The Wizard, but I understand why Nintendo used it as an opportunity to market the game. People call that movie a feature-length commercial, but honestly, SMB3 deserves a commercial of that length. It is, to this day, my favorite Mario game.



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As of an hour after sundown today, Yom Kippur ended for another year. Due to our local synagogue refusing to take our money for reasons we still haven't really been able to figure out, we didn't get tickets to services, so instead schoolpsychnerd and I watched a simulcasted Kol Nidre service put on by Nashuva last night. I took a few of my vacation days and took the rest of this week off, so I stayed home, and one of the things I did during Yom Kippur was read the book of Jonah, as is traditional.

As with most "why do you..." questions in Judaism, there are multiple answers as to why Jonah on Yom Kippur. The two I know are first that it shows that G-d is like the Terminator and will follow you to the ends of the earth such that there is no escaping his sight or knowledge, and second that it shows G-d's mercy because Ninevah was wicked but when Jonah delivered G-d's message, they sincerely repented and were spared, just as we hoped that sincerely repentance will ensure we are written into the Book of Life. I'm sure there are multi-page dissertations on the exact meaning of the withering tree at the end even though G-d spells out what he was trying to demonstrate exactly, but those I don't know.

One other thing I did, once the sun set, was play a game:



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Did you know that Metroid is a girl?!

(I used that joke on schoolpsychnerd earlier. If looks could kill...)

My first exposure to Metroid was the original game, which I sadly seem to have lost somewhere over the years. It's also one of the original NES games that I beat on the original system, after hours of wandering around through Zebes, using JUSTIN BAILEY to get a preview of later areas with an overpowered Samus build. JUSTIN BAILEY also meant that I was spoiled on the secret of Samus Aran's real identity. I heard it on the playground, as you did in those days, went home and tried it out, and my mind was blown. I mean, the wave beam? What madness was this?

Oh right, also Samus Aran was a woman. I don't remember having strong feelings about it at the time, but memory is fallible.

My strongest memory of the original Metroid is actually the time I ruined a game through idiocy. There's a part of Norfair that has a series of one-block pillars over lava pits that you have to navigate to progress:



While I was jumping over them, I wondered if I would be able to get out if I fell in, so I deliberately fell in. And then I spent a while trying to bomb-jump my way out and continuously failing over and over again. No matter how hard I tried, at times getting within a block or two of the top, I would fall back down into the lava again. Eventually I gave up, turned the game off, and went to go do something else.

"But dorchadas!" you say, "Metroid had a password system! If you had died in the lava, you could have put in the password and just restarted that way!" And you are absolutely right, but let me direct your attention above to the word "idiocy."

The next time through, I ended up falling down into the lava accidentally, but that time I managed to get out and go on to beat the game. Not under the time limit, of course, but a win is a win. And then I didn't play another Metroid game for over a decade until my roommate in Ireland lent me his GBA and copy of Metroid Fusion, which I barely remember except that I wasn't a fan of the constant AI companion. Metroid is space horror at its roots, and that's always been a thorn in the side of any attempt to make it more narrative-based. The point of space horror is that you are alone and there is no one out there to save you. Adding companions and commanding officers and so on works against that in a way that I don't like.

Even adding extra info is a problem. Take Metroid Prime's Space Pirate scan data:

Phazon mining is under way. Several garrisons have been established, and terraforming of the Chozo Ruins is under way. Security systems are operational, and Science Team continues to make progress in their biotech research. The Phendrana Drifts have proven to be an optimal location for Research Headquarters, and soon it will be joined by a fully operational Combat base and starport. If Command's predictions are half true, we shall rise to dominance in this sector within a deca-cycle. Truly, these are glorious times.

Blah blah blah blah. All the additional information is like that, and you have to scan all the time. My main memory of Metroid Prime is entering a new room and immediately switching to the scan visor and scanning every available surface. Compelling gameplay!

I didn't come to Super Metroid until 2009, two decades after my first Metroid game, but even then I didn't beat it until later. I wrote about that already here.

Other M and the fan reception to Federation Hunters seem to have killed Metroid at this point, but it was always a lot more popular in the west than it was in Japan. And Sakamoto doesn't seem to understand what bothered people about Other M and isn't that interested in doing another Metroid game anyway, so who knows if it'll come back any time soon. In the meantime, though, the fans are stepping up to the plate: Another Metroid 2 Remake finally came out today after eight years of development! Get it before it gets C&Ded!

Also, this fan film is pretty neat:

Watch on YouTube

And while Nintendo might not care, and Sakamoto might not care, Hirokazu Tanaka (the composer) does:

Shatterhand is one of those second-tier NES games like Kick Master or Vice: Project Doom or Power Blade that don't get talked about as much as Castlevania or Mega Man but are still pretty good. I've wanted to play it pretty much since I saw it in Nintendo Power back when I was subscribed to it, but I never did for reasons that I no longer remember. Fortunately, the state of modern gaming and the fact that I do all of my gaming on my computer means that I can play all the old games I missed out on and then write about them in a way that I never would have thought to do as a kid.

The intro is less than informative about the game. Our hero is fighting either a robot or someone wearing power armor and shooting a machine gun, which pour hero blocks using his bare hands. Then he punches the robot. The end. Truly a story for the ages, or at least for NES platformers.



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Spelunky is one of those games like Minecraft that first came to public light while I was living in Japan and spent almost all of my video game time playing World of Warcraft. Unlike Minecraft, where I played the in-browser alpha and didn't understand what was so great about it, I didn't even hear of Spelunky until years later, after I quit WoW and so had more free time. The original version of Spelunky is still free online and available here, but I played the HD version.

When I first bought it, I was absolutely awful at it, mostly because this was before I had bought a controller and so I was trying to play with the keyboard and did...okay. It wasn't until I tried playing it with a controls scheme better suited to platforming that I actually managed to get anywhere, though. And then I played, and played. There were weeks where I'd play a game of Spelunky every single day. Just load it up, play until I died, and then try to get through as far as I could, which usually wasn't very far. And then the next day I'd play it again, and over time I got farther and farther down into the caves until, at last, I won.



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Kanji? Gasp!

Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse is one of the games I've had since I was a kid. The NES cart is actually in a box behind our TV right now, lacking only the means to actually play it. I managed to get pretty far through diligent practice, but I was never able to get to Dracula. I think the furthest I got was Frankenstein before I ran out of lives and continues. In the years since, though, I learned that I was going about it all wrong (about which more below) and came back to the game in my 20s and finally managed to beat it. So when I sat down today wanting to play some Castlevania, I figured I wouldn't play the game of my childhood since I'd already beaten it and moved on. But I wanted to play Castlevania III. How, then, to thread the needle?

Well:



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Gargoyle's Quest is another one of those games I learned about through Nintendo Power. I was positive that it was through the Counselor's Corner section, but I looked through most of the Nintendo Power issues that I had a child and I could only find one question asked about Gargoyle's Quest and it's not about the topic I remember. I looked up the game in a Nintendo Power database, checked issue #12, but even it doesn't have the question asking where to find the Wings of the Falcon that I remember reading about. Which is good, because the answer is, "You talk to the townsghouls and follow their clear and explicit instructions." I won't say it's impossible to screw up, but it seems very unlikely.

Anyway, this game wasn't quite what I expected.



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I first downloaded this back before I went on my trip to Oregon and I played through most of it then, but I didn't quite beat it, and it wasn't until I went to satinalien's wedding this weekend that I had more offline time where I fired it up again. It was described as "one-button platformer," so I assumed it was going to be mindless distraction that I could button-mash on the plane to pass the time. And I suppose there was a lot of button-mashing, but calling it "mindless" would be doing it a disservice. There's actually a lot of thought put into Jack N' Jill's systems within the constraints of its design paradigm.



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Until today, I'd never beaten Super Mario Brothers. I've beaten plenty of other games in the series, but every time I played the first game I'd always get stuck in the same place--World 8-1. There was a jump I couldn't make no matter how hard I tried, and eventually I just gave up and moved on. None of the other Mario games I played presented quite as much of a wall for me, and I'd only think occasionally about that jump and about how it was a spot on my gaming backlog, so this morning on a whim, I loaded it up and started playing.



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Metroid is one of the franchises that makes me wonder what it means to call yourself a "fan" of a series. I mean, I could say I'm a Metroid fan, but I've only played and beaten Metroid, Super Metroid, and Metroid Fusion. I've played Metroid Prime but never beaten the final boss, and I've played Metroid II for maybe 20 minutes. That's a better ratio than I have for Zelda games, but it's not that great.

I suppose that's not that relevant to the topic at hand, though, which is how amazing Super Metroid is.



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