Preface
So, here we go I guess. I am inspired to do something along the lines of the garbage day newsletter and they use substack. So does Jason Schrier. So now, I follow. I love the idea of writing. I enjoy writing too, much more than I enjoy actually talking. This seemed like a fun healthy way to express my ideas and put them out there into the world in a public fashion. Not as much to say, hey look at me. Look at how smart I am, but more along the lines of. Hey, this is me. This is where I am right now. That may change, I may get better at writing. I may get worse, who knows. I may need to hire an editor in order to cut out all this unnecessary rambling that I’m doing. Maybe I will voice act this and turn it into a podcast. Maybe I’ll have an ai voice act it and use the proceeds from whatever paid revenue comes out of it to hire an editor and make videos out of this for content. I personally love being able to read along with articles so definitely the AI reading thing seems to be a good place to start. Only time will tell.
So lets get started. The purpose of this website is to help me form opinions, and not be ashamed of them. Those of you who shame me will be punished to the fullest extent of the law. So who am I? I am currently a game design student in school. Who really likes keeping up with gaming news, but also technology news as well as some other more niche pop culture stuff.
Games aren’t what they used to be. It’s my fault.
So what’s new in the world of my opinions. Well, for me current games aren’t what they used to be. Which I have a feeling says more about me than it does about the games industry as a whole. Recently I finished playing through and almost %100’ing the Spyro Re-Ignited trilogy. Or rather, the first game in the spyro trilogy. This was a game series I’ve known about since I was a child, but never really took the initiative to play. At this point the infinitely expanding games space means that I will never be able to play all the games, but I’m glad to catch up on stuff I missed from time to time. Playing this game revealed to me a few truths. First that I feel bad for the Toys for bob team which proved that making older game styles like this can both work, and be successful if enough passion is poured into it. I feel bad for them because activision likely has them working on the next Call of Duty expansion or game, or warzone tac on. Which is not a total loss, but I hope the people on the team get the props they deserve and get to work on a project that is creatively satisfying to them. The other thing I learned is that for me I like it when games are games. Which perfectly points out for me how I felt about the second and third game in the spyro remaster. I finished the first game very excited about the other two because I loved the animation, and the voice acting for the dragons and for spyro. The levels were fun and interesting, and it was not shy about being a video game. It had levels that you collect all the gems by killing enemies, making tough jumps, and generally exploring. It’s a gameplay formula that I love. All I wanted was more spyro. What I got in the next set of games was a drastic departure from that, and one that took away from the things I liked about the first game rather than adding to it. The gems are no longer an indicator of how close you are to fully exploring a level, and have become pennies that must be picked up in order to progress. The intrinsic motivator of just enjoying exploring and being rewarded is gone, and has been replaced with a cost benefit analysis which ruined the amazingly satisfying experience picking up a gem really is.
Next the part that I really dislike are the side challenges that have now been thrown into tacked on gimmicks for each level which are gated off by the number of kills the player has. In the first game these would have been skill challenges that the player engages in organically while exploring. The player is instead hand-held to say, oh you can only complete the challenge when we say so. The kill requirement is also reset on death. In the first game killing enemies for the first time rewarded you with gems, making even the killing of enemies to be more of a reward then a road block. If you died, well, you already killed that guy so you don’t have to anymore. Plus if you didn’t care about the gems then great, because there is no requirement to kill anything to proceed except perhaps the final boss? So now this semi-optional element of killing enemies has become mandatory to participate in the optional challenges.
The last problem I have with the spyro sequels is the fact that over the course of the games instead of fleshing out spyro and featuring more of the titular character they decided to take the marvel metaverse/silent protag approach. I ended up not learning anything interesting or new about this amazing cast of dragons from the first game, or getting to hear much more of spyro at all really. He is just yanked out of his universe into another one that is currently in peril so he has something to do again. We get a whole new cast of characters who do nothing but lecture spyro. He never gets a word in.
The spyro games also suffer from the mid 2000’s “woah” ification of things. The first game is very pure in idea, and it has very much a personality of its own. Something that I didn’t expect from what on the surface looks like very generic fantasy. Where bafflingly the second, and especially the third game really suffer from this. The third game has spyro straight up riding a skateboard with pads and everything. This was the point I stopped playing altogether. If I was a child in the past around the time this came out I probably would have thought this skateboarding minigame is awesome. In an age where parents could only justify buying you so many games having whats popular tacked on to the franchise you like makes the games value that much better. After all I grew up with Jack and Daxter and Rachet and Clank two games very guilty of doing the same thing. But what is interesting to look at now in retrospective is the idea of a sequel in games. These games used a sequel as a means of diluting what made the game fun by hotwiring the latest thing into a pre-existing franchise for sales. Where I think the conventional academic “sequel” is adding to and expanding an idea.
So that is a long winded explanation of why I stopped playing the Spyro re-ignited trilogy after the first game. I would just like to point out that I don’t think that it has anything to do with Toy’s for Bob. From what I can tell they did an amazing job, and my complaints rest on the merit of the original games and not on any changes made by the remastering dev team. It is also a long winded explanation of why I may go back and %100 the first game without playing the second two.
In similar news we can finally power wash final fantasy VII’s midgar in power wash simulator, and this just might be the thing that gets me to buy the game.
To be completely transparent I just got a steam deck. I love it. I love it more than I actually want to play games on it which is a weird thing to say but I think its true. I hold it in my hands understanding the full power of a linux operating system is mine for the taking that can play all my favorite games wherever I want. Then I launch a game and immediately close it because I don’t actually want to play any game specifically right now.
This connects to power wash simulator because I saw a news article about the new power wash simulator that lets you clean up the world of final fantasy VII and to be honest. That sounds like a lot of fun to play on the steam deck. I’ve been a casual backseat enjoyer of final fantasy VII for a long time (with the constant historical praise how could you not be) but I don’t personally care much for JRPG gameplay. I find it tedious and not very engaging. But having the twist of putting a power washer in that universe for me to mess around with, explore, and appreciate the lovingly crafted world from a non-combat point of view actually sounds really fun. I feel like it connects to the spyro idea that I talked about earlier because it takes away all the bells and whistles from the traditional FINAL FANTASY experience and just says, hey this is a game. This is the world the game is in.
To wrap up this whole first post I’ve been thinking about how would “Wes Anderson” style translate to video games. I’ve learned a lot from the fantastic Thomas Flight videos on this, and I have personally been obsessed with Anderson and the Cohen brothers as of late. To me the idea of a rejection of naturalism seems to be the key factor in the sense that the films are aware they are telling you a story and present it in a pleasant yet self-reflecting light. I find that I really love films that do this. Basically anything by Wes, or O’ brother where art thou, Big Fish, and the Big Lebowski are among some of my favorites right now. So I’ve been thinking about what a rejection of naturalism in video games looks like. That first version of spyro, while very crude feels like a rejection of naturalism not through abstraction, but through gameplay. It is not shy about its gameplay but instead tells a real story around the gameplay interactive elements using them as setting and framing. The struggles the player goes through in order to save some of the dragons are real, the challenge is real. And some of the dragons even comment on that. That to me is what great video games should do, and why I really enjoyed the first game. That is also why I love Outer Wilds. I won’t expand on that though I just wanted to have Outer Wilds get mentioned at least once.