it's ponti dot club
I wrote and deleted a whole post about Witch Hat Atelier that consisted of several paragraphs describing ways in which I'm mildly dissatisfied with it--the pacing, the flatness or at least simplicity of characters and their interactions, the way the magic as a metaphor for illustration isn't really up to wrangling with the politics of illustration today. All these paragraphs concluded with, "well,…
I guess I didn't understand the degree to which Against the Storm is designed around roguelite progression. It's a fun colony sim that screeches to a halt every minute and a half so you can choose some minuscule resource production boost or an uninspiring 2% stat increase. Maybe this implies that I've enjoyed my time with the game less than I have, but what else can I say? It is very much what it…
This is that fan remake of Mother in the form of an Earthbound hack , and the SNES presentation makes it feel very contemporary, maybe more so than Earthbound even. It's not just that the aesthetics of these games are foundational to so much indie effort at this point, it's Mother's particular attitude toward the RPG as a set of conventions. It isn't irreverent--there are a few…
In 2023 veteran games writer and video personality Jeff Gerstmann decided to make a ranked list of every NES game released in North America. And then he did. In 2013 critic Tevis Thompson wrote : Objectivity is very convenient for the straight white middle class male gamer. Videogame culture encourages him to see his own subjectivity as the standard, as objective. He’ll invoke science, economics,…
I'm not usually into roguelite autobattlers. I don't hate that they exist, I just tend to play them for a few hours and then never touch them again. I mean, I do this with a lot of games. I'll feel like I get what a game's going for and then I'm ready to move on. I like 9 Kings , though. Its 15-minute self-contained runs don't waste your time. The main game mode is good, but the real draw for me…
There used to be a kind of webcomic whose author, faced with the terrifying freedom of the website format and the urgent need to publish or perish, either failed or refused to rein it the fuck in, to set purposeful boundaries around their thing. Billions of years go by, universes are created and destroyed. Time is travelled. Physicists are named and quoted by full-on fireball-throwing wizards. I'm…
Pokopia is extremely pleasant. But here's the thing that bothers me about the Ditto. It's not the noodly arms. It's the mouth. I don't like how there's nothing in there. Mimic a tongue or something. In any case. I have fun with these games, the character-focused world-sims(?), when they give you a lot of things to do and then don't pressure you to do anything in particular. I struggle with farming…
Postmodernism is not the belief that everything is relative and nothing is real. This is a willful misunderstanding perpetuated by political conservatives, a standard case of right-wing projection and blame-shifting: they insist on an alternate reality while claiming their opponents are doing the same. The postmodern problem, if you choose to view it as such, is more like, in a culture in which…
I don't know if Legends is the "best" thing coming out of Pokemon now, but it's the thing that most interests me, and at least it's not more live service garbage, right? In a series of games for 8-year-olds, the Legends games dare to target 12-year-olds, and their distance from the strict conventions of the bifurcated mainline entries lets them actually try things. For example, Legends Z-A gains a…
I don't have a lot of patience for these stories anymore, the sad otaku story, this extremely turn-of-the-millennium thing. 1 Almost always they become self-help narratives about doing what you want, being true to yourself, forging the mode of adulthood that best serves you. But consider: what if hooking your self-worth directly into a plastic model representing a corporate intellectual property…