Listen to the Rain

Right now, Genshin Impact is in the middle of the "Lantern Rite," its in-world version of the Lunar New Year--and after years of WoW and then years of FFXIV, let me tell you how refreshing it is to have holidays that aren't transparent copies of modern American holidays, even if they are transparent copies of modern non-American holidays (they've had a Mid-Autumn Festival version too)--and as is typical, there's the main quest and a bunch of minigames you can do for extra Genshinbucks. One of the minigames is a version of Puyo-Puyo, a kind of competitive block-falling game where combos of matching blocks on your side cause various penalties for your opponent. It's been very popular in Japan (and I guess the rest of East Asia) for a while, but until recently was only released in the West under other names, like Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine or Kirby's Avalanche. And I guess this is another such release, since they changed out all the characters again.

Anyway, Laila has really latched on to this game. It's hard to tell sometimes what games she'll want to watch and what games she doesn't care about, but after seeing this, maybe the key is that she loves minigames. When sashagee is playing Infinity Nikki she loves watching fishing, and when I booted up Vintage Story and she saw a river, she wanted me to go fishing in it. Once she saw that sashagee was playing this game, she settled in on her lap to watch, and I told Laila that it was called "Puyo-Puyo" and that led to this.

( Video of cuteness within )

The subject line of this post was yelled after the video was taken. And this morning, she asked me to play Puyo-Puyo after I mentioned it while we were on a phone call with poppa and nana. She really does love Puyo-Puyo.

I was looking for the Myst intro to rewatch it this morning, and since my phone's system language is Japanese, the first result was indeed the Myst intro...in Japanese:

Watch on YouTube

I hadn't even realized that Myst had a Japanese translation, it makes perfect sense. Such a popular game, that singlehanded did so much to popularize the CD-ROM format and sold tens of thousands of CD drives to gamers, of course it's going to get a Japanese translation since there's barely any text or voice in the game so the cost of translation is minimal. So as I do with these things, I listened to the intro, transcribed it, and translated it:

この本は、私が計画したとおり、誰にも永遠に破壊することはできないだろう。それは星を散りばめたような空間を、さらに落ちて行った。結局どこに落ちたのか、もうそんな推測も無駄に思えてきた。

ただ、私の中に解決されないひとつの疑問が残る。それはいったい誰の手に「ミストの本」渡るのかということだ。この疑問に、終わりはないだろう。

だからエンディングは　書かずじまいで終わることになるかもしれない。

And here's my admittedly-clunky translation:

"The book, just as I had planned, could not be destroyed by anyone. It kept falling into that star-filled void, and to what ultimate destination it would fall would be pointless to guess.

"However, there was one unresolved question remaining to me. That was, into whose hands would the 'Myst Book' ultimately pass? That question still had no answer.

"And that is why the ending may not yet be written."

Most of it is pretty much the same, but that first line?! In the English version, Atrus expects the book to be destroyed until he's in the middle of enacting his plan, but in the Japanese version, the book was indestructible from the start. I'm not sure it actually changes the plot at all--I haven't played any of the games past Myst, so I don't know if this is a vital plot point--but I wonder why the change was made?

Also, I really like one of the comments on that video:

数十年前のwindows95のデスクトップpcを捨てずに取っといてある理由がこれがプレイできるからである
"I've kept my decades-old Windows 95 PC so I can keep playing this game."

I plan to replay Myst this year and finally beat it, since it's one of the few non-WWII-based games my father has beaten that I have not.

Newbies can't Triforce.

Someone linked to an article on Kotaku about this game, saying that it was a take on the original Hyrule Fantasy, but with puzzles involving warping of space and perspective. I loved Antichamber when I played it, the way that the puzzles all involved changing how you thought and trying actions that would be nonsensical in a normal game. Walking backward through a door led to a different room than walking forwards through it did, A window might look on two separate rooms, neither of which is the one on the other side of it. I grew disenchanted with Antichamber when it turned into more colored goop puzzles than unorthodox thinking, and I was hoping that Triforce would recapture the feeling of the first half-hour of Antichamber.

It was fun, but being another Antichamber isn't what it was trying to do.


( Read more... )

Capsule review: The beginning half an hour of Antichamber was one of the best puzzle games I have ever played, and then I got the first gun and it all went to shit.

Okay, that's a bit harsh. Maybe more like, "and it turned into Portal but not as good."

For background, Antichamber is kind of like Portal except with more non-Euclidean geometry and being inside an Escher painting. Making three lefts is not always the equivalent of making a right. Backtracking down a corridor does not always take you back to your starting point. You can fall down for a thousand meters and climb one flight of steps and arrive back at the floor where you fell from. That kind of thing. None of that was a problem, and indeed, it was actually really great. One of my favorite RPG scenarios ever is Night Floors by Dennis Detwiller, which has as its setting a house with similar properties, and based on the videos I saw of the game before I played it, I kept calling Antichamber "Night Floors: the Game." And that's not an inaccurate assessment, though Antichamber has fewer insane people in it.

In the beginning, you're just dumped into the world of Antichamber with no explanation and no understanding of what to do, and you have to learn how the world works as you go along. There are a lot of puzzles with incredibly simple solutions that require lateral or out-of-the-box thinking, helped along by signs with aphorisms like "The choice doesn't matter if the outcome is the same" or "Life is full of ups and downs" or "Raw persistence may be the only option other than giving up entirely." All of the signs have some relation to the puzzle they appear near, though it might not be the most obvious relation and may require some thought. Then, after passing through several trials and twisting your brain around itself, you find the first of the guns that let you manipulate the blocks you've seen here and there.

The problem with this is that now that you can move blocks around, block puzzles show up. That's bad enough, but the real problem is that there are multiple kinds of guns, each of which can manipulate blocks in different ways, and you need each gun to get the next color of gun. That's the classic Metroidvania formula, and usually I love Metroidvania games, but I don't think it works here.

The reason the first part of the game is so great is because you know that every single puzzle is solvable. You can bang your head against the wall for a while, but if you can't progress you know that it's just because you're approaching it the wrong way, or you're concentrating too much on the surface of the problem without looking at it from multiple angles, or because you haven't thought of some trick that's necessary to progress. You can go everywhere--you just need to think about it the right way.

But once you get the gun, you realize that's not actually true, and that some problems simply can't be solved without the advanced abilities of the later guns. The whole game becomes limited and a lot of it is just a tedious exercise in moving blocks from place to place. Sure, you still can't approach everything straight on, but more often it's just a question of where to move the blocks and how to get them through the fields that prevent you from transporting them with your gun than in interacting with the strangeness of the world.

The entrance room--the antechamber, if you will--does deserve some praise, though. When you start the game, you're in a black room with white lines, and several walls are blank. As you play the game, one wall fills in with the various pictures you find throughout the game, and the other wall is a map. Rooms that you have found all the exits from are distinguished from rooms that still have secrets, dead ends and exits to other areas of the map are marked, and you can teleport back to the entrance room at any time. It makes leaping around to go to different areas or resetting puzzles that you've screwed up much easier than any other Metroidvania or puzzle game I've played before, and while Antichamber's particular conceits make this an easier mechanic to integrate here than it would be in, say, Metroid, it'd be nice if they could find a way. One of the most aggravating and time-consuming parts of any Metroidvania is the running all over the place trying to find the place you need to use your newfound powers at.

It took me around five hours to beat, so half an hour of fantastic and the rest of an adequate puzzle game that honestly wasn't terrible, but the brillance of the opening made it look worse than it might be. I bought it at 75% off, and at that price it's certainly worth it. At the very least, play until you get the first gun, and if you find it tedious and boring, set it aside. You've finished the best part.

THE CAKE IS A LIE!
THE CAKE IS A LIE!
THE CAKE IS A LIE!
THE CAKE IS A LIE!
THE CAKE IS A LIE!
THE CAKE IS A LIE!
THE CAKE IS A LIE!
THE CAKE IS A LIE!
THE CAKE IS A LIE!
THE CAKE IS A LIE!
THE CAKE IS A LIE!

( WTF is he talking about? )