back after years lost in the metaVRse

so back in late 2017 I made a trip to Miami and came back with a psvr in my bags. And this small device had a huge impact in my gaming life.

I got the Skyrim bundle and also a demo disc was thrown in. Right away in the demo disc title screen I was blow away by letters floating right in front of me - I had experienced phone "VR" and nothing in it had me prepared for positional tracking really putting me there in those virtual places, being able to get closer to those letters or marveling at my virtual hands holding a virtual gun as I waved it in front of my face and checked all detail upclose. It was all mind-blowing, even all the ridiculous common objects manipulation in Job Simulator, and especially the demo for Atari classic reimagining with Tron visuals in Battlezone. And then I was in Skyrim, with a shield in my left arm and a sword in my right hand and a dragon spitting fire from high above the sky in a large open grasslands...

And over 5 years straight inside VR games, here I am, now on a Meta Quest 2, inside Resident Evil 4, Myst and Sam and Max and wondering when flatlanders will ever stand up from their greasy sofas, put down the old battered 80s routine of pushing gamepad buttons in front of a last century tv and embrace the single biggest jump forward in gaming ever...

whatever, their loss. I just feel like a citizen from the future shipwreck in time among dirty ignorant medieval peasants who think the earth is flat and their pitchforks are truly nextgen gear... sure, buddy...

Nintendiots and the death of discussion in Internet forums

Nintendo has turned, like Star Wars or Disney itself, into a cult. All megapopular shallow forms of entertainment eventually do. It's shallow, derivative and empty of any real message for everyone to see and thus all loonies who depend on it to fill their existential void fight for it like fierce crusaders spreading their faith upon the dead bodies of their enemies and detractors.

I'm one of these corpses, piling atop how many others?  How much criticism have these rabid faithful cultists wiped and hid beneath the carpet?  Along the internet years I've used accounts such as nemesis, namekuseijin, fotorama, Erik and a bunch of others in forums such as Metroid Database, Eidolons Inn, slashdot, Reddit, Uol, outerspace and consistently I've been banned or shut down in a way or another - do these people even know what a forum is for?

And all for stating the obvious: Nintendo makes the same kiddy games since the 80s over and over and their consoles are crappy obsolete hardware running only old games and retro indies. Somehow, stating simple, direct observation facts is enough to grant you a ban.  It's like stating the king is naked or God is nowhere to be found.

Discussion is dead nowadays, you can't get intelligent, reasonable discussion with arguments anywhere in the Internet these days. Current human race representatives are barely more interesting to try to hold a conversation with than a potato. It's all about dumbly pointing fingers up or down at people pointing fingers. Congrats, Fakebook.

This is why I'm resorting to my soliloquies at a blog again. This and dialoguing with long dead book authors in their old pages is the only way to get any kind of interesting discussion in a world ridden by blind cultists busy with their gatekeeping.

Deadvania

Dead Cells is a metroidvania rogue-like with melee swordfighting combat akin to Dark Souls - which is the only metroidvania millennials know and they like it not for the exploration of expansive organic maps, but for being punished over and over by giant bosses. That is to say, they rush through the whole level without paying attention to minor enemies or the ingenious level design just to reach bosses and get their sorry masochistic asses kicked.  This is how Dead Cells plays, except for the lack of any ingenious level layout.

It's just an uninspired procedurally-generated level with familiar elements repeated over.  You'll die a lot and see these same elements in different order as the maps change.  The maps are irrelevant, unlike in true metroidvanias and even in Dark Souls: you can just run in a direction and you'll hardly hit any dead ends or secret passages, more likely the end of the level.

Visually it's beautiful, though I don't understand the need for pixel "art" to somehow try to legitimize this as a game worthy of the classics - hardly any of these millennial games going for the "art" ( or should I say limitation?) of the classics go for the kind of hard gameplay of the oldies.  Though this one is harder than usual, probably due to the challenge to rush through the level with little regard to your health and safety. You'll get tons of innocuous upgrades for all your diligent rogue dying. The more upgrades, the longer you can endure rushing through irrelevant level layout filled with ever more of the same simple foes...

Frankly, it feels more like an irrelevant mobile infinite runner than a classic metroidvania. It's sad

AC Odyssey is the best flat game this generation

A true heroic Odyssey, a fine historical reconstruction, a mishmash of references to histories, myths, legends and to other games. It takes the best out of AC, The Witcher 3, Horizon ZD, Shadow of Mordor and even GoW and brings it all beyond.

And it's absolutely huge! Took me 9 hours of feverish and sheer joyful exploration and hard combat (at least playing on hard) to leave the initial islands of Cefalonia and Ithaca and watch the title screen!  I looked at the map and how tiny that is compared to what is to come - and yet Cefalonia alone is quite big by itself and full of variation in geology and looks, from forests to beautiful beaches, to the top of mountains where a huge stone Zeus aims his thunder arrows.

That sea is really something to see.  This game is gorgeous looking already, but its sea is really surreal, specially with that special sunlight. Dolphins, ships, sharks, whales, albatrosses, it's all alive. How far they've come with their engine since AC Black Flag.  Sea exploration is awesome, crucial to the gameplay, combat is very nice and now the ship got upgrades, including recruiting new crew.

Speaking of combat, lots of goodies to speak there. First, lots of different weapons, including lances, swords, daggers, axes, etc. You now, much like in Bloodborne or GoW, hit with shoulder buttons - a weak attack (R1), a strong one (R2) and ranged attacks with a bow (L2 to aim, R2 to shoot). Plus  as you upgrade your skill tree you slowly get more options, like charge attacks and others that you choose where to go in the buttons layout, both for melee (like Spartan kick) and ranged (like multiple arrows). Timing blocks for counterattacks is crucial, but you may also just dodge as in Witcher or Dark Souls.  Some of the finishing moves in weakened enemies are brutal and in slow motion much like in these games as well.

The old Zelda OoT mechanism to focus on an enemy at a time that so many other games used is still in place and works really well. Easy to change the focus, though not easy to deal with several at once. As always, the best option is either to run and hide and try to take out as many as possible stealthily before direct confrontation.

Your eagle is a valiant asset here, flying and scoping the area, finding treasures and informing you of enemies positions. It seems some skill updates can also bring some of her fighting powers to your side. Valiant ally indeed. I missed Origins and thus never played with the eagle before. At first I used her just to leisurely take a better look at those breathtaking vistas and scenarios - it's surreal, really. Just slowly I realized she has a real function in the aforementioned attributes.  BTW, I think she's a better way to take a look at your surroundings than the old AC eagle view, where it worked like an Animus virtual sonar of sorts to bring to attention vital information. This way is more natural, and requires you yourself to carefully scan the area for threats and opportunities. The eagle was always linked to AC from the first trailer and the beaked design of the hood... it's good to see it physically materialized. BTW, she comes to the hands of Kassandra in shops or during periods when you don't move the character. Beautiful sight.

I'm playing as Kassandra. Doesn't fit historically with an all-male Greek society where women and slaves didn't have political rights - specially, say, in militaristic Sparta.  But it's a historical virtual reconstruction in the Animus by 2 modern day women archeologists, so hey... it's fun anyway to see her kicking the ass of larger foes and she's beautiful to look at anyway. I wonder what she'll do once she reaches that poetically mythical island of Lesbos.

Now let's talk a bit about the interface?  It's cleaner than in past AC, where it could get very polluted. But of course, the amount of cluttering depends on what you choose to show - I go with a minimalistic option showing just vital info, like enemies health and some mission markers. About main menu interface itself, some of the most neat and downright good-looking I've seen in any game. It's got this nightly look to it and the text and icons are the right size and easily conveyed and separated by tabs. Kassandra shows up close in her highest LOD much like Kratos in GoW without however bringing the cooler to take off.  The menus never slow down as sometimes in The Witcher. I'd say it takes menus from these games and also HZD and further polishes them.

I've mentioned Shadow of Mordor as an influence, right?  Enemies can place a bounty on your head and strong mercenaries show up for it. You can see markers for them in the map so you can avoid or confront and boy are these fights hard - guess further on I can expect Valkyrie-level fights.  I think further on you may also recruit some of these mercenaries to your side and make them go against other bounty hunters - mimicking some of the play mechanics that Shadow of Mordor brought to the game world with their famed Nemesis system.

Speaking of influences, I don't want to spoil much but there's a character that looks just like King Leonid in the movie 300 and is nicknamed - wait for it - The Wolf of Sparta! Bwahaha isn't that a reference to both the Ghost of Sparta and the White Wolf?

srsly, this game got so much to it and is so full of the source for all heroes in legends and games that it's now easily my favorite flat game this generation

The joy of mobile text adventuring

Once upon a time, there were these incredibly bulky computer hardware capable of far less computing than even the most modest cellphone these days.  It was in one of those that Adventure was born.  Instead of investing in crude raster blocky pixels as other games from the era, it completely lacked "graphics": all of its interface consisted of textual prose describing the game surroundings and events, to which the player responded with text commands at a cursor in turns.  Yet it captured like few the imagination of early computer games players and spawned a whole industry.  The adventure in the action-adventure genre comes from it.  Back then, such computer games were called adventures and when graphics finally were introduced to dillute the whole experience, text-adventure was coined to separate them.  Or interactive fiction (IF), as the influential company Infocom began marketing it.

Adventure, Adventureland, Zork and all such text-adventures were outside of my gaming diet back then.  I was a kid, born just a year before Crowther began writing Adventure.  My usual fare were atari 2600 arcade ports in the early 80's.  Luckly, I never played the inane Adventure for it, where the vivid prose was substituted for buttugly blocky pixels and all your adventuring was just maneuvering a dot around twisty little 2D mazes -  the most infamous part of Adventure is the one part that spawned the most copies and tributes.

Anyway, I first learned of text adventures in the second wave of creative boom the genre experienced in the 90's, when a hobbyist community gathered around the then new-fangled authoring tools on usenet allowed them to recreate infocom-level parsers and level of detail.  The early days of the web led me hunting down for the past of gaming, and among console emulators I found text-adventures.  Many talented authors flourished back then and created games that focused on story and content more than the big sprawling map of mostly empty rooms, all alike, of early commercial text-adventures.  Curses, A Change in the Weather, Anchorhead, Varicella, Savoir-Faire are higher watermarks to me than even Infocom's best.  Because I experienced them first?  Not quite, I played most of these, including infocom games, well into the 2000s and I'm still to finish most of them.  Back then, I started with easier entries, most from IFComp and its "beatable under 2 hours" rule.  I fondly remember Uncle Zebulon's Will as the first IF I actually finished back then, Photopia being another.  It left in me an enduring taste for the genre - the only one in gaming where graphics don't grow old and neither does gameplay: text never grows old, nor does turn-based gameplay focusing on exploration and puzzle-solving (even if it's just figuring out the puzzling story and your role in it).

I guess I went through all of that just to state my immense joy of simply playing anywhere, anytime on mobile hardware.  It's an experience so remotely associated to the genre and to the usual fare of dumb tap-based mobile games that at first it seems highly unlikely, but it works wonders.  In these last few days of vacation with no gaming aparatus other than a 7" android tablet, I've been able to complete quite a lot of IF I've been playing on and off for years on desktop PCs. I am now led to believe one of the reasons I was so sluggish is that sitting down in front of a screen and keyboard is definitely not my definition of fun.  I can finally read IF like a book, think for a bit the situation and turn on the screen whenever a solution creeps into my mind.  Writing short commands on a virtual keyboard one-handed is also nothing terribly unusual to someone used to whatsapp and other such text messengers.

In short, this is undoubtfully my preferred environment for IF.  iPoney fans have iFrotz, but I'm using the android app Son of Hunky Punky , and despite its title being a marketeer's nightmare, it's Android's best for IF, supporting both zcode games and TADS (through frotz and tads backend interpreters).  Sadly, no glulx and worse yet, it seems to be receiving no more updates, but it's pretty featureful and stable - one of the best features being saving the whole game state, complete with whole playthrough so far, when you leave it and restoring it when you choose the game again (not working fine with TADS).  For games itself, it's just a matter of accessing the venerable ifarchive, or user-friendly ifdb.

"But wait, interactive fiction these days only requires tapping on choices, you old fart."  yeah, kid, and none of those choices nor those thin hipster twitter plots or irrelevant stats are for me.  more rants on that soon...

About crackhead gamers

It kinda dawned on me that gamers these days are like crackheads: they go around blindly at a fast pace,  babbling silly oneliners on a mike, always on the lookout for the next game/dlc/stone/level/coin/headshot/pokemon/trophy or whatever and don't even realize they got into this automate, proud-slave-of-the-month routine in the first place for the promise of uncompromised fun and the simple joy of exploring a virtual world.  Some ought to be reminded of that from time to time.  There's nothing more embarassingly silly than seeing the industry pour tons of money into creating lush, large virtual open worlds with hollywood-grade artistry in every corner and texture only for the players to completely ignore all of that once they begin hunting down each other in their glorified online paintball.

Crackheads shouldn't be a trouble to non-crackhead gamers, right?  There are plenty of games catering for everyone's tastes nowadays, right?  Well, in reality, the industry not only caters for the cracksters as it also thrives on them: what could be more profitable than the millions of addicts always on the lookout for the next yearly rehash of a thematic paintball with millions of bandwidth lost on free marketing on youtube?  Only the next hit low-budget trash "free" mobile game with tons of microtransactions.

Anyway, there are indeed games for everyone, crackhead or not.  But the force is undeniably with the former.  And it really pisses me off when that kind of power is such that developers feel tempted to take a real classic such as FFVII and ruin it catering for their fucked up tastes, like moving battles from turn-based wits combat to dumbed down button-mashing or inserting some pointlessly bogus online component so that people can roam around dressed like digital pointy-eared peasants and live on while some oldschool single player heroes try to save that world from an impending doom that shall never happen nor menace anyone.

So contradictory trying to please real gamers, delirious crackheads and anxious investors...

Super Metroid

Super Metroid is one of my favorite games ever - a large action-adventure side-scrolling platformer with plenty of powerups and much exploration of its intricate, ingenious level layouts. Super was a mindlessly common pattern for titles for the Super Nintendo, but this title truly deserves it.

The last Metroid is in captivity.  The corpses are in peace.

The game opens with a memorable prologue telling us the finale for Metroid 2, where Samus finds the last Metroid hatch and as it opens the baby Metroid follows her around.  Unable to shoot away the creature, she delivers it to a team of scientists at the CERES space station.  The findings of the scientists about the energy absorbing properties of the creature were amazing and they found they could use such properties for the good of mankind.  Unfortunately, Samus was barely off to other venues when she catches a distress signal:  CERES Station was attacked!  She heads back and we're in game.  After the prologue, a Space Pirate gets the Metroid and Samus follows close, eventually getting to a seemingly dead planet that will be our home for many creepy nights to come.  (yes, the game is best served at night)

too late

Samus can always get back to her ship to refill energy

Launched in 1994 for the SNES videogame console, it's third in the series after Metroid for the NES in 1988 and Metroid 2 for the original B&W Gameboy in 92, or close. They all follow bounty hunter Samus Aran working for the Galactic Federation in her quest to rid the galaxy of the threatening menace known as the Metroids, all the while also battling Space Pirates.  She's a loner and receives no help in her perilous adventure, but for the powerups she may find.

a Chozo statue holding a helpful powerup

A lone woman in metal gear suit combating aliens?  Sounds familiar?  Just a year or so before the original NES game release, Aliens was showing in movie theaters a sweaty Sigourney Weaver clad in a robot suit fighting a huge alien.  The Metroid creators said, no, their inspiration came from an obscure Japanese horror movie.  Right.  Just as Brad Bird never read Fantastic Four comics or Watchman prior to The Incredibles.  It's amazing the number of denials one has to go not to blow up some legal mines. Certainly Nintendo learned their lesson from the Donkey Kong vs King Kong lawsuits and Bird at least now can directly tap from Fantastic Four since it's now all Disney, Marvel and Pixar. Sadly, the Watchmen link will ever be denied.

behold proto-Samus Aran in her metal gear

IP rants aside, Super Metroid is a must for all fans of deep exploration games. It features a massive twisting map that is all interconnected, shock full of secret passages and rooms. There is no such thing as level 1, then 2, 3 etc as was common in games of the era. It's one organic thing, connected by hatches with slight loading here and there.

the in-game map was a novelty and much helpful.  not all passages were shown

The map is vast and open, you can go anywhere and backtrack to choose other routes if the one you face is locked and you have no key.  Here, the key is usually some new suit powerup.  Hatches of specific colors demand specific powerups.  Once you get the proper one, all such hatches open to you.  There are also many open spaces unavailable and once again, it's all a matter of having the right powerup.  Make no mistake, it's one of the most brilliantly conceived maps I've seen in any game.  This level of detail and finesse in the crafting of maps led to its own genre, named Metroidvania after this game and Castlevania:SotN which followed the formula close - I myself feel From Software's Demon's/Dark Souls has this Metroidvania vibe in their sprawling interconnected map layouts.  It spawned a variety of clones.

retrogamers call Shovel Knight a Metroidvania. looks like plain Megaman to me

The Swapper is the game that closest captures the essence of Metroid to me

I've been intrigued by claims that younger gamers of today found the game bewildering.  The layouts are thouroughly fair:  once you face a locked passage, you should not desperate and whine all over, just try another route right ahead or backtrack.  Backtracking with new gear almost always leads to previously locked doors that are now available.  Actual backtracking is pretty rare:  the genious of the level design is that after following a trail and getting a new powerup at the end of it, you almost always find that the end of is very close to the path where a previously impossible path awaits, as the designers cleverly plotted.  That said, it may well be most of those lamers are just kids with yet no proper puzzle-solving skills.  I played Super Metroid when I was about 20.

Samus faces a rather small boss

The action part of the game is that of a side-scrolling platform shooter, with many powerups extending the basic bullets to missiles, beams and the always handy grappling hook.  There's plenty of it to make any shooting fans trigger happy.  Plus, the weapons are integral to exploration and indeed to puzzle solving.  Here's a small spoiler:  the ice beam powerup can be used not to simply shoot away any opposition, but to actually use their frozen bodies midair as bridges to difficult to reach places.  When you first realize that is such an enlightening moment, one of the many that make this a deeply engaging game.  As is the morphball and many other bizarre new powers, and there are quite a few that are a sight to behold even right to the very end.  Like in all good puzzle games, you discover yourself the uses for them when required.  No baby-sitting here, no tutorial.

you can shoot in compass directions

Graphically, the game was top back when it released for the SNES.  The organic scenery was a marvel to behold, animation was fluid and the larger-than-life, Samus's suit sparked, monstrous sprite bosses seemed impossible on the hardware.  The various underground regions teemed with exquisite organic life, walls covered in moss, spores, mud, stone, underwater or lava fields, you name it.  Very rarely the scenery felt like a living character in a game to me.  The Jabu-Jabu interior in Zelda:OoT looked straight from Super Metroid in places.

lush graphics immersed the player in the organic environments

Soundwise, the game had somewhat muffled sound and music samples, but the soundtrack was much too excellent for we to care if it came either from an old scratched vynil or from pristine dolby digital.  The music ranges in tone from the horrific, to the placid, to the dreamy and also features some classy electronica.  My favorite music ever being the Brinstar red soil area, an awe-inspiring duet of piano and flute.  The original tracks and many fan-made variations can be heard in soundcloud.  I love the piano solo variation for the Brinstar red soil called Lonely Petals.

red soil area was all about climbing, but I loved every moment

One of my most vivid feelings during the many days while I was playing it was the extreme loneliness the game evoked.  You're a lone human clad in a space suit pursuing an alien life form in an alien, perilous world, mostly underground.  Rarely I've felt this save-the-world feeling so well executed, something a player only truly gets from single player games - fuck this whole "campaign" thing from modern multiplayer games.

a statue of the main bosses.  These bastards are vicious!

The game had enough WTF moments and simply awe-inspiring scenes.  In one of them, you're taught by a bunch of infant etecoons how to get away from the hole you've fallen into - not all alien life there is bad guys.  There are the ancient and mysterious Chozo statues that present you with powerups and sometimes do some rather unusual stuff.  The powerups are not all just about shooting too, I won't spoil the many surprises the game has to offer.

baby etecoons are more fun than ewoks

An absolute classic however you see it.  It's as much impressive, horrific, beautiful, claustrophobic and mindblowing as it is fun.  One of the most complete gaming experiences I've been lucky to be into.  Even back in 1994 I felt it was a truly a major, ambitious step forward to videogames.  Can you believe this is the same Nintendo of the wii?  no, you can't...  actually, inside Nintendo there was the Miyamoto division which unleashed the company's fortunes with Donkey Kong and Mario and there was the older division led by Gunpei Yokoi, famed mostly for Metroid, Kid Icarus and mainly Gameboy.  Yokoi division games certainly have a very different feeling then Miyamoto's more popular one.  Sadly, he was killed in a freaky car accident not long after his Virtual Boy failure and Metroid games went mostly orfan, handled to american studios, turned into pinball, ridiculed by Miyamoto and his mushroom-addict following.  Disgusting.

The game however is not without it's faults: even back then jumping never felt as smooth as one could hope for, there seeming to be a slight delay as it begins falling after peaking (something they improved much in Metroid Fusion); the wall jumps also lack a bit of finesse (not as tight as in Shinobi).  Frankly, those are peanuts next to so much greatness the game offers... do yourself a favor and buy it or just download the ROM and a SNES emulator, it just deserves.