indigozeal

As you've probably heard, Igarashi's successor to Castlevania was announced and fully funded within a scant two hours. The bright roses-'n'-jewel-tones art design and gothloli aesthetic is proving a sticking point for me, partially because it's a bit removed from the mist-covered, slate-grey Transylvania we all know and love, and partially because it's so weirdly reminiscent of Neo Angelique, right down to the protag's frilly purple skirt-dress. But stained glass is a really intriguing visual motif for the game - something that connects the game with its forebear yet lets it go in a new direction artistically. It could set up some killer lighting effects. The game's in an embryonic stage - not scheduled for release till two years hence - so we'll see how this new style pulls itself together.

On a more pragmatic note, it is a bit depressing to see Igarashi slumming it with the Game Grumps plugging indie darlings like Shovel Knight and Rogue Legacy, games that are already success stories and don't need additional exposure. I understand it's great publicity for Igarashi's own project, and he himself explains magnaminously in the Kickstarter video that the soul of Igavanias lives on in the games it inspired. I just wish the folks on U.S. shores had the good grace to get out of the man's way in this critical hour, but asking for grace from anyone on the internet seems to be too much these days. It's cheering, though, that the new game will be produced by Inti Creates, the same studio that's behind Mighty No. 9 and which seems to be turning into a safe haven for Japanese talent that's been given the shaft in the mobile boom. "I'll finally be able to make a game that uses a controller" - poor man.

I love that the final stretch goal is voice acting by David Hayter. Top-notch presentation, additional rewards that unlock with social media & fanart activity, and tiers like "put your pet in the game's bestiary" - man, this is how to do a Kickstarter.

(In other news, I have yet to get into the backers' forum for the NightCry Kickstarter.)
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I ran across this article yesterday, where the author was discussing reactions to a previous piece where she expressed disappointment in an MMO storyline. She had received a couple of replies that went along the lines of this one: "Well, I guess because I have really, really low expectations of the storytelling in any video game. In thirty-five years of playing them I can’t recall a single example that goes beyond the standard you might expect in an example of a middling genre narrative in another form and even that would be the exception."

My reaction was the same as hers: she asserted that she'd played a lot of games with great stories and therefore wasn't about to lower her expectations. Frankly, if you haven't encountered any good game stories yourself (particularly in "thirty-five years of playing"), I really have to wonder what kind of games you're buying.

I think, though, that the "video games are stoopid" reaction also stems from a failure to realize that good writing takes many forms. I think the people who complain that "there are no good stories in video games" are looking for the stereotypical idea of a Great Novel: a lot of writing and a lot of dialogue that's delivered straight-on by characters in the style of a play, featuring a great deal of SAT vocabulary & circumlocution and a very elaborate plot with a lot of developments that discusses Things of Great Importance (though not anything too weird; let's not get all freaky here). The problem with this - the first problem - is that the shift in medium also entails a shift in the way stories can be told. I don't agree that Dear Esther tells a great story, but I think reviewer Maxwell McGee hit truth when he noted in his review of the title: "video games allow for pacing and discovery that would be impossible to reproduce elsewhere." You can ignore the medium and take the straight visual-novel approach detailed above, but you're missing out on storytelling avenues interactivity affords you. The secondary problems are ones that involve underdeveloped tastes and a misunderstanding of proper execution: Great Novel stories aren't the only ones worth telling, and the Great Novel approach isn't always the best one for a given tale.

Resident Evil's plot, for example, is very standard straight zombie horror (and no one needs to mention the voice acting), but the "Itchy. Tasty." diary is a killer piece of storytelling. The diary is written in prose that's sparse, direct, and pedestrian—decidedly not what anyone thinks of as "great writing," but it'd actually hurt the story if the diary were more elaborately penned. The simple account derives its power from its prosaic everyman perspective - the author unwittingly detailing his loss of humanity, and how horrific events unfold around him in contrast to (or, really, as part of) the mundanity of his working environment: first, he's seething over coworkers who cheat at cards; then, the dogs he's paid to watch are strangely quiet; next, his best friend is waking him up in the middle of the night and telling him to put on a "space suit," and then he's uncomprehendingly watching blobs of his own flesh fall off his arm as he scratches it. The events are scarier because the character doesn't know the significance of what's happening to him; if he had been a more educated or knowledgable character, his story wouldn't have worked. The method by which the player initiates this tale - how it's nothing more than a diary hidden in the corner of an ordinary room, and the player just happens upon this big scare unannounced, in the course of routine investigation, also underlines the horror in a commonplace environment and the virtues of self-pacing & discovery McGee mentioned - as does how the narrative is preceded by you having to execute the diary's owner, who first appears as just another zombie. But then, every zombie here was a living, thinking individual before they turned, weren't they.

For another example, Neopets thingamabob Flight Rising has no plot, but the writers put a great amount of effort into their 120-charas-per-entry flavor text, and I always check it whenever I get a new item. There, the writing is used to worldbuild and to give the player an additional little reward for playing the game, acquiring items, and expanding their hoard. Gone Home is a game-length examination of how found documents can be used in aggregate to tell a story of a household. Baten Kaitos deserves recognition for its immensely likable playable characters, but it also does smart meta stuff with its themes and the player's perspective on events, to the point where it actually involves her in acting out those themes through her reactions to its plot twists - one of the game's major ideas is the need for forgiveness, and though it never states the parallels outright, the game has you go through your own crisis of trust as you come to terms with your viewpoint character after he betrays you - not just the other cast members, but you the player, who is a character in the game in your own right. Phantasy Star II lets the setting do its talking, revealing the truth about its dystopia in the contrast between the bright, crisp cheery colors of its world and the clinical coldness of your discoveries - the nameless bodies of the once all-powerful "scoundrels" you find in Shure; the floating aborted experiments in the Biosystems lab with their malevolent, glowing glares; the matter-of-fact, blink-and-it's-over horror of the reunion between Darum & Teim.

Then there're the examples of just plain straightforward good writing. Lunar has excellent character writing in Ghaleon. 999 has great character dialogue writing. A Dark Room goes crazy places from the most modest and unassuming of beginnings. Ib is a sweetly-told children's horror romp. Chrono Trigger is a zippy, breezy adventure through time that's loads of fun.

Ironically, a number of the examples of notably bad video game writing that come to mind for me revolve around attempts to take the Great Novel approach. Virtue's Last Reward is a poorly-written game because (among many other reasons, but this is a big one) the writers mistook good writing for a lot of writing, resulting in a poorly-paced narrative that tries the player's patience and insults her intelligence. The new Castlevania games are stupid because they believe a story is automatically quality if it's Grimdark & Serious, and because they have no sense of humor or fun about their material. (The above also applies to Chrono Cross, but Chrono Cross has so much wrong with it storytellingwise that I don't think triage is possible.) It's relatively simple to be impressed into submission by an overstuffed Victorian-novel tack and refuse to be wowed by anything else; it takes a bit of understanding of how stories work - or maybe just enough of an open mind to engage with the media you consume instead of dismissing it out-of-hand due to preconceptions about media & genres - to see brilliance elsewhere.
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Just a selection of some of my favorite game box covers. A warning in advance here: LiveJournal's odd formatting and my general ham-handedness when it comes to HTML and working with graphics might lead to some presentation issues when pairing my text with the images. Hopefully, though, the art here speaks for itself.
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Hey, how've you been? I've had a pretty good Easter, in contrast to last Christmas. I burned a copy of the Mystic Ark soundtrack to accompany me on the drive to dinner, and I was in the process struck again by the score's idiosyncratic track names: "Your Eyes Are Always Beautiful When You Fight," "C'mon; Packed with Power, I'm Your Opponent!" and "Greetings; How Are You? With Me, It's Just the Same Old, Same Old, Day in, Day out." The titles often take this familiar, chatty tone toward the characters whose actions are being scored, sometimes written from their perspective as dialogue, which suits the frequent Alice in Wonderland stage-play tone to Mystic Ark's events, as well as the ultimate prominence in the game of a loving, watchful parent figure. (In a slightly different vein, "Your Eyes Are Always Beautiful When You Fight" has always grabbed me as a title, straddling the line between ennobling endearment and fetishistic voyeurism.)

It got me thinking about how track names can be an art all their own:

- Secret of Mana is another game with lengthy track titles: "The Color of the Summer Sky," or "What the Forest Taught Me." Reflections or observations of phenomena - little glimpses of the natural world. Which is appropriate for a game that's all about an appreciative journey through the wonders of nature.

- Motoi Sakuraba's score for Baten Kaitos is, like Mystic Ark's, an OST famous for its slew of alternate track names. "A Tower Built on Sand," like the track itself, is evocative of the illusory, transitory nature of the phantasmic continent Mira in its sand castle imagery - an unusual combination of natural & manmade beauty built on an unstable foundation, here one moment, gone the next.

- No More Heroes names its tracks with inexplicable conglomerations of nouns and modifiers - "Pleather for Breakfast"; "Mach 13 Elephant Explosion" - that nonetheless describe the bizarre fights they score. In a few instances, though, the references escape me; I've investigated multiple times whether "Stop Hanging DJs" is an anagram for something but have come up empty-handed, and I'd still like to know what "Vioectrolysis" means. "The Virgin Child Makes Her Wish Without Feeling Anything" is a long title for a short song, but it matches the grandioseness of the performance and the over-the-top melodrama of the song's events.

- The classic in the department of odd videogame track names is FF8's "Only a Plank Between One and Perdition." It manages to sound poetic without actually communicating a coherent visual metaphor.

- Phantasy Star II had some evocative track names for an early RPG, due perhaps to a character limit on the in-game sound test that allowed only for very short names that were "Engrishy" in their seeming irrelevant abstractness but appropriate anyway. "Violation," for instance, plays in the Esper Mansion and is appropriate for what feels like trespassing into such a still and holy place. "Never Dream" is unsettling, like the infamous ending - not threatening, but adrift, subdued, and vaguely elegiac; a disturbing half-memory from a phantasmal world that lingers with you through the morning.

- The first Silent Hill gives its tracks names with apparent deep significance ("Only You," "Till Death," "Heaven Give Me Say", "Never End, Never End, Never End") that do not correspond at all with the situations they score. That's in line with the game itself, though - a message from an alien frame of reference. This shred of ephemera means something to somebody, but damned if we're going to let you in on what it is.

- The Castlevania series has a rich history of music, but I'd single out "Cross Your Heart" for the title's three levels of imagery: a crucifix held against one's heart (or, as the alternate track title states, "close"); a sworn promise; and the action of crossing oneself in a prayer for divine guidance, or to remain safe - all three of which suit a vampire hunter.
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During his run of Silent Hill 3, Kyle of Run Button was talking about not using the beef jerky item, with which I haven't bothered much, either. "There's just stuff in games that I don't use," he explains. Me too:

- I never bothered much with FF6's Coliseum besides getting Shadow. Stuff where you have to screw around excessively and sort through your entire item cache to get anything worthwhile never appealed to me.

- Likewise, I never did anything with Mystic Ark's monster-battle sidegame. I never investigated exactly what the rewards were for fooling around with the thing - looking at an FAQ, they seem to be some middling consumables - but using the OHKO option to turn enemy monsters into the Figurines that you need to play the sidegame seemed too chancey, given the track record of RPG OHKO options.

- I never paid much attention to the fashion mechanic in The World Ends with You that boosted your stats if you were wearing on-trend clothes. It would've been interesting, but you never need the stat boosts; even if you play around with the difficulty sliders, The World Ends with You is not a hard game.
TWEwY has a great many good systems, in fact, that you never need to really delve into: the pass-the-puck mechanic where whichever partner has the energy puck in TWEwY's team battles deals more damage, which compounds the more you chain your combos; the bit where food that caters more to a character's individual tastes heals them better; how you can get deals on clothes at various shops the more you come in and talk to the shopkeepers. I actually like all of these ideas - if anything, TWEwY has too many great ideas to fit in one title, which is not a bad problem to have - but you just don't need the help they provide.
I did, however, hate Tin Pin Slammer or whatever it was called in the Japanese version. The board is just so ugly - a glaring problem in such a visually-distinctive game - and the game itself boils down to nothing but flailing about on the touchscreen. I would've liked to have played the "Another Day" AU scenario, but its reliance on Tin Pin killed that idea quickly.
(Back to clothes again, though: I would've bothered with the fashion system more had the character sprites reflected my outfit changes.)

- Casinos. Forfeit Island, Ultima's rock-paper-scissors, twenty-one against Lunar: The Silver Star's Brett - I'll try them once just to play them, but the win-loss ratio never seems to justify the time involved. If I want to play electronic blackjack, I can dig out any old black-and-white LCD keychain from the 80s. I'm here for a different game, dammit. (The only title where I've sunk significant time into gambling is Countdown Vampires, where the gambling was broken to the player's advantage - and in the end, even the time I did put in apparently wasn't enough.)

- Speaking of Lufia, I actually did fool around a good deal in Lufia II's Ancient Cave, but not to the extent most other folks do, getting all the Iris items and whatnot. And the Ancient Cave is one of the richest sidequests out there, truly a full game unto itself, but in the end, I have a story to finish (and I have limited tolerance for Lufia II at the best of times).

- Everyone ooohs and aaahs over playing a protagonist with an assault rifle in a survival horror game, but Eternal Darkness's ranged weapons are so hopelessly inaccurate that I just stuck to melee weapons exclusively.

- The usual dead-weight status-effect spells in RPGs, particularly those like Pig or Toad that promise to incapacitate the enemy at very low levels but have a very low chance of hitting. Why waste a turn that you could use to attack and do some actual damage? (Outside of a game that isn't fundamentally broken like FF2, I mean.)

- Speaking of deadweight spells: I for some reason was compelled in my Sega CD Eternal Blue game to level up everyone's magic equally, regardless of how much I actually used it. This led to Ronfar's dice magic being leveled just as much as, say, Lemina's stuff, despite the fact that I cast it only like twice in the game.

- I never fooled around with Phantasy Star III's technique distribution that much in previous runs - and it's still not that useful overall, since most of PS3's techs either fall under the aforementioned status-effect garbage or are way-underpowered offensive techs - but I'll tell you: changing one healer's grid in the third generation to max out Res and another's to max out Gires really saved on TP. (I have to wonder if similar tinkering could actually make one of the offensive spells useful.)

- I never delved nearly as much as I wanted into Baten Kaitos's item-creation system where you experimented with item cards in battle to fuse new items, but that was in great deal to me misunderstanding the system for a good portion of the game. Also, it's not like I didn't try sometimes, but straights are in general too much of a damn hassle, or at least require too much desk rejiggering, to pull off, at least compared to pairs.

- There was a ton of junk I never used in Earthbound, mainly due to poor game design. There's no reason ever to call for a pizza delivery if the delivery guy won't ever come to a dungeon. There's no reason to keep condiments clogging up inventory to give a piddling 10-HP boost to your healing foods in a game with such chokingly little inventory space. There's no reason to keep most of the game's items, in fact, given that matchbook-sized inventory. A shame.
I also didn't use the teddy-bear dummy party members if I could help it, despite the concept behind them being fundamentally sound, because who wants to see a teddy bear get wrecked?

- Steal commands. I actually made a proper go at using Steal in my FF5 game, but - as with other titles - you just don't get enough back to justify the cost in lost turns.

- Rename cards and the like. I keep my guys with their official names.

- Red Mages and Thieves in the original FF. I was the type who always stuck with the guide's recommendations for party members. Supposedly, this is completely the wrong way to go about the game, though.

- The weak little melee weapons with which you come equipped at the start of the game in most Silent Hills, because come on. I can never find an appropriate juncture to use the ampoules, either - if I'm in distress, it's usually because I'm slowly, gradually being picked apart by a legion of enemies, not being quickly hacked up by just one fight in a relatively short, definable time frame.

- Shields in general, if they mean taking away a weapon from a character. I don't believe I've ever touched an Emel (outside of never-equipped treasure-chest pickups). I know some folks are fond of giving Rune two shields in PSIV and having him rely on TP, but I'm so miserly with TP (I have to save it for the boss) that this wouldn't work for me.

- Also, shields are supposed to be godly in Symphony of the Night with the Shield Rod, but I'd rather be walking up to enemies and whacking them directly than pressing a remote-denotation "kill all enemies" button, if that makes any sense.

- Richter. Fuck Richter and his finicky fighting-game controls and his spastic dashing and his flamboyant tumblesault leaps and backflips halfway across the screen that always land me right in the enemy's clutches. Castlevania's the type of game where you want a handle on where your character is at all times and a solid single-button attack constantly at the ready.
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After tackling the entire Sonic library, cousins Keith & Kyle of Run Button have begun a quest to play all the Mario games. Highlights thus far: a sweater-making title; a story during a 25-minute final battle with Wart about, of all people, Vladimir Putin; and a jaw-dropping adaptation of the original game for Japanese PCs. ("Did they sell this?!" "They sold this. --For people." "For PEOPLE?!?")

You can tell from the name of my FF7 tag what I think of the game, but these are legitimately awesome. I almost want to buy a Sephiroth one.

Eastern Mind can be a difficult read; it's not pretentious, as the fellow means every word he says and is honest in his appreciation of artists, but dude's word choice and verbosity can get in the way of communicating his ideas at times. He's inarguably a scholar, though, and provides glimpses into intriguing, sideways Japanese titles that didn't make their way across the Pacific: Yuuyami Doori, a horror title where three childhood friends (and a dog) navigate elementary-school politics to solve local hauntings; Mizzurna Falls, a seeming forerunner to Deadly Premonition from the makers of Clock Tower; Marusa no Onna, an adventure game based on a movie about a middle-aged tax collector... I especially enjoy his "Standard Reception" posts, where the author uses batches of videogames he's newly bought to run rapid-fire through his memories of various systems and eras.

I did not expect a good short POV Clock Tower fic on fanfiction.net centered on Bobby, of all people. Or one on Kay. It's a bit unnuanced, but that's OK; I like its slice-of-life feel.

I like the sprite work on this hack that lets you play as Zelda in the original game, and the idea of zodiac-shaped dungeons piques my interest. I might have to give it a go. (But I still, over 25 years later, haven't finished the original's second quest yet!)

Neat old-school RE shirt. (I like how we're now defaulting to the movie for how the T-virus canisters look.) I also love this Silent Hill 2 shirt but doubt I could pull it off. It's sold out, anyhow. This company seems to have a bad habit of not doing reprints.

Kimimi's Stuff posts rare screenshots, movies, and manual/book scans from the 16- and 32-bit-era, daily images of Saturn games, and media on gorgeous titles (or at least titles with gorgeous promo art) from the unexplored but fascinating nascent Chinese videogame production market.

You've probably seen/heard this particularly "Bloody Tears"...arrangement already, but it's still top-drawer.
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I was delaying posting this until I finished my reaction posts for the first half of Silent Hill 4. I'm not going to get back to that game in the next couple weeks, though, and I'd rather do one unbroken stream of commentary for it - so heck with it; let's get this out the door and take an accounting of the games I played in 2012.


Beaten:
Neo Angelique, PSP ("be an ordinary Aube Hunter" ending)
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, PSP via Dracula X Chronicles
9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors, DS
Glory of Heracles, DS
Silent Hill, PSP via PSOne Classics
Mystic Ark, Super Famicom (via emulator)
Earthbound, SNES (via emulator)
Ib, PC (RPGMaker title)
Eternal Darkness, Gamecube
Silent Hill 2, Playstation 2
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Gamecube (finished main campaigns, all three characters; finished Orthanc w/ Gimli & secret character)
Resident Evil, Saturn (finished Jill w/Chris rescued; you gotta give me more notice than that to get Barry out alive, game)
Phantasy Star III, Mega Drive (x4, via emulator & save states - I've given enough to/done my non-assisted time with this game already)

Little stuff:
Slayin', PC (finished as Knight and Mage; end boss keeps killing me as Rogue!)
Home, PC

Played, not finished:
most of the NES Mega Mans, Gamecube compilation - I had part of a separate post all typed up about this, but long story short: I discovered I don't really have the patience anymore for try-try-again platforming bullshit of any stripe. I enjoy the Robot Master stages but lose interest in the Wily levels. I haven't finished a single game, sadly.
Lumines II, PSP
Every Extend Extra, PSP
Metroid, NES - Yeah, about this. I made another go at Metroid this summer and actually made considerable progress over my earlier attempts. I hit a complete wall, though, at Kraid - I must've gone at him an Arino level of times and can't really beat his (frankly ridiculous) pattern. I thought more energy tanks might help (I had three), but I soon learned that to find the other energy tanks in Metroid, you have to shoot walls. All the walls. Every inch of all the walls - and there's nothing that differentiates wall sections that might hold items from those that don't. I mean, there're 100 to 1000 wall tiles per room, and I've uncovered about 60 rooms to date. I could look up the answers - but I've uncovered so much on my own that I feel (stupidly, I know) that resorting to an FAQ at this point would be giving up, even though the game is patently unfair. So I'm at an impasse where I'm too stubborn to get help but won't progress on my own. Bah.
Innocent Life: A Futuristic Harvest Moon, PSP
Girl's Garden, SG-1000 (but you can never finish this)
Silent Hill 4: The Room, PS2



Best: Silent Hill 2 by a wide mile.
Symphony of the Night is a good runner-up. Honorable mention goes to Ib, a neat small game with strong art design that does a lot in its limited space.

Worst: Objectively, it's probably Phantasy Star III, but I knew all about that going in. And at least it's trying. In some parts. Kind of. Earthbound, on the other hand, was an aggravating and frustrating play experience that didn't deliver on its vaunted charm and humor and had open contempt for the player. Second was Glory of Heracles, a big "why bother?".

Surprisingly Good: Ib takes the cake here, a sprightly little game that's smarter and more elegant that it ever had to be. Girl's Garden also figures in: '80's arcade games weren't supposed to be outright pretty, and "girls' games" weren't supposed to be actually good. On the LP front, I'll steal from the Something Awful thread and note that MODE, an FMV dating/party/conversation sim where the positive/neutral/negative tone of your responses rather than a formal dialogue tree dictates story development, is in the Deadly Premonition framework: a game that arrests your attention with sheer, seemingly-amateur bizarreness but gradually betrays legitimate quality and stimulating originality.

Miscellanea: 999 is very good, compelling and tense with likable characters and great music. That said, it's gotten a Deep Space Nine/Firefly-type fandom that aggressively proselytizes, and its flaws - the pseudoscience; the demand for excessive replays; how the final twist is kind of a leap too far - are shortsold. Eternal Darkness finishes strongly and has some good environments at the end but is rarely scary and kind of stupid for most of its length. I'm making peace with Silent Hill as time goes by, but I'd put in the "interesting curiosity" basket before the "classic"; its attempt at a story hinted at, not directly told, is done miles better by its sequel.

I can't really think of a single moment or place in Home that I can point to as a standout, but its commentary on how the choices available to the player must work to form a coherent narrative deserves recognition.

Great characters: James Sunderland and all his entourage. Angela in particular - despite all her mental scars, it's she who goes to her fate with eyes wide open. The J.D. plotline, what I got to play of it, was done refreshingly well, taking the revelation of J.D.'s true nature and going from there instead of ending with it - examining what it meant for this truly kind person to be an artificial, created being, and how he consequently felt apart and "different" from the rest of society despite all his warmth and good cheer because of it. I didn't finish the game or even get up much past his intervention in the plot, but I can't overlook Silent Hill 4's Walter Sullivan: he who has done the unspeakable, has had the unspeakable done to him, who within himself contains multitudes and paves a bloody trail in his quest for eternal love and safety.

Making room for 999 and its wealth of contradictory descriptors for the best of its cast. Snake: intelligent, given to cheerfully smutty remarks, omnicompetent yet still overconfident, devoted in all humility to his sister. Lotus: a techie, a mom, a coward, a shrewd thinker, a romantic. Clover: At first an innocent ball of genki; later a deep brooder who takes duty and proactivity to impressive lengths. Seven: a consummate professional, a gregarious goof, a physical force, yet more often than not the smartest man in the room.

LP-wise, Dietrich Troy and the revelations about him in the true ending, crystallized in one perfect scene, the one on the bike. (I know supergreatfriend's Spy Fiction LP was from 2011, but I just got into it last year.) Shadows of the Damned's Garcia Hotspur: "I'm a Mexican, Johnson, not a Mexican't." (Yes, I know that line was stolen from a movie, but it fits Hotspur best.) MODE's Mohawk mobster Riel Attaychek is an infuriating conversationalist but a kind of fascinating jerk. He seems to genuinely like people and have a healthy roll-with-the-punches outlook on life but is nonetheless abrasive, self-absorbed, and materialistic, which is an interesting and refreshing choice for a game's Guide to Inner Wisdom.

Great Moments: Silent Hill 2: "I got a letter." The opening walk. Angela on the staircase. "...It's all the same once they're dead!" Mary's ending monologue in the Leave ending. Pretty much everything from rowing across the lake onward.

Ib: The doll room. Eternal Darkness: The final battle. 999: Safe ending: The laugh, and the transformation afterwards. Glory of Heracles, of all games: The death where you learn the truth about the Heracles situation, which I thought was the one graceful note in an empty game.

Silent Hill: The arrival of Kaufmann in the ending, where a tertiary character oversteps the boundaries of his role and changes the entire game, and the jokey end credits. Silent Hill 4: Looking out the peephole during Apartment World, which signals a drastic change in Henry's participation in the narrative. Look into the abyss...etc.

LP greatness: Spy Fiction: The scene on the motorbike, and the ending revelation/confrontation. Shadows of the Damned: I'm not sure this falls into greatness, but I was stricken by the backstory of the songstress Justine, who remolds herself through supreme force of will in response to social mores that aren't even there. It's tragedy and triumph all at the same time, and I'm still not sure what to make of it - except that it's very Suda. MODE: Again, not sure if it's great, but learning what the DOMEs did in the second MODE stream was memorable, and participating in SGF's stream itself was great.

Great places: The Myst-like outside of Silent Hill 4's water prison. Ib's art gallery, and the style of the "town" near the end. Silent Hill 2's fog-covered walk and last location. Mystic Ark's still and silent Myst-like hub island, and its awesome world 6. (Lotta Myst goin' around, but there're far worse visual references.)

Great music: Well, nothing's going to top this.

Most fun: Knocking down ladders atop the Hornburg in Helm's Deep in The Two Towers. Running back 'n' forth poppin' enemies with your little pixel sword in Slayin'. Swinging the sparkly Jewel Sword, or happening across the Valmanway and wondering "what's this?" just before you activate your Win Button in Symphony of the Night. Taking out enemies with one whack of Silent Hill's mighty emergency hammer, particularly after all the skin-of-your-teeth fighting in the first half of the game. Executing spell overkills in Glory of Heracles and getting back more MP than you doled out for it. Dropping blocks to "Regret" or "Black Tambourine" in Lumines II. Romping around collecting purty flowers in Girl's Garden. Navigating Ib - the neat visual puzzles, what artworks you'd encounter next, combined with frequent save points, made playing a delight.

Lessons learned: I am always right and should not second-guess myself when I've decided it's time to cut my losses from a title. Earthbound.

That's it for 2012! Will 2013 be even better? (Spoilers: ehhh.)
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The original “Iron Blue Intention” strikes me as a very divided composition. I’d pin the issue on a main line that’s remarkably fragile, rendered by a delicate synth reminiscent of a harpsichord - an instrument never really meant to hold the center of an orchestral composition, particularly those as frenetic and momentum-driven as Castlevania’s. It never really establishes itself; the intro goes up and up without forming a complete musical idea - certainly not before that backbeat kicks in, which has an unusual rhythm, is out of step with (and sometimes louder than) the other half of the piece, and threatens to usurp the main line’s proper dominance. The “harpsichord” does gather steam, and its urgency is an intriguing counterpoint to its elegance, but it gets out of breath, so to speak, as the composition winds up/down, sounding like my grandmother’s old hatchback going into 4th gear up a hill at the end. “Iron Blue Intention” has an insidious charm to it, but it certainly seems odd in its initial milieu in Bloodlines, an old German munitions factory made of I-beams and chainlink, and it’s hard to believe it was originally intended as a character theme - character themes by definition are meant to signal a strong, distinctive presence, and “Intention” doesn’t communicate a single, unified idea.

The Judgment remix deals with that problem by a simple solution: everything in the composition is in full force behind the main melody. Only a few very soft notes in the recesses of the music remain of the backbeat. The instrumentation is a complete about-face into strident brass and drums. The result is a tonal 180; while the original is creeping, decrepit, this version of “Intention” is outright martial. Though its underlying concept is simple, it’s a strange arrangement for being so at odds with the source material (and, indeed, outright chops out one-half of it). It’s an intriguing example, though, of how sometimes going in the completely opposite direction with a problem piece can bring out its strengths. The assertiveness of the brass gives the intro an impressive nimbleness, while its self-confidence takes over for the harpsichord in lending “Intention” an aristocratic air. And there’s a fierce momentum to the piece now; once it gets to the hatchback part, it has enough steam to sound like the culmination of a frenzy, of a hard-fought military campaign, rather than a show of weakness. It’s a joy to hear - the joy of a sound composition allowed to bust free and reach its full potential.

By the way, I’ve never understood how Eric’s Judgment costume has come to be considered that game’s ultimate insult (instead of, say, poor Grant’s). If you’ve been a valkyrie and a cowboy, then Blue Boy (or Largely Charcoal Boy) really isn’t much of a stretch.
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LJ doesn't allow crossposting anymore, so this is a repost of the books I read for the 50bookchallenge community, with short linked reviews, bests & worsts, etc.

1. Planet Narnia, Michael Ward: While Ward's thesis that each of the Narnia books purposefully reflects the medieval conception of one of the classical planets is intriguing, it's too hit-and-miss, too oddly structured, and way too riddled with apophenia to make its full impact.
2. "The Winter's Tale", Shakespeare: The next time someone tells you that "The Taming of the Shrew" was just meant ironically and was not intended as a straight take on his views of marriage, remind him that he wrote a play in which you're expected to root for a murderous king to get back the wife and child he tried, with precious little dramatic instigation, to put to death; also, that said play was thinly-drawn, tone-deaf, and dramatically lightweight.
3. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Vol. 1 (from A Study in Scarlet up to "The Adventure of the Second Stain"), Arthur Conan Doyle: What can I say that you haven't heard already.
4. Japanese Women: New Feminist Perspectives on the Past, Present, and Future, Kumiko Fujimura-Fanselow, Atsuko Kaneda, et al.: A much-needed and quite enlightening collection of viewpoints by native authors on various aspects of life for women in Japan; would that there were an modern version to shed light on the landscape 15 years later.
5. Alien Hand Syndrome, Alan Bellows et al.: Focuses a bit much on the more nauseating tales and doesn't entirely escape the curse of websites for bite-sized reading not translating quite well to print, but still lives up to its source's Damn Interesting moniker and is a good gift for that person who has everything (provided they can handle a bit of college humor).
6. Maskerade, Terry Pratchett: While the material about theater folk is only a little weaker than the author's usual fantasy-to-real-life satire, the book's kind of oddly morally tone-deaf for a Pratchett, and it has the A.I. problem of an ending that thinks it's jubilant but in reality is quite depressing.
7. Under the Sea-Wind, Rachel Carson: A lushly lyrical recounting of an ocean ecosystem through the eyes of a few of its residents, but the sheer thickness of the imagery and poetic prose makes it a bit inaccessible.
8. The Sea Around Us, Rachel Carson: Much of the geology is outdated, but it's intriguing to see here the origins of the pop science tome, clearly structured and with the basics of marine science well-communicated to the layman.
9. Anno Dracula, Kim Newman: "I got you two tickets to that thing you like!", the novel: you can't make a what-if-Dracula-won story out of nothing but pandering and paper-thin, too-clever-by-half references.
10. Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You, Sam Gosling: What promises to be a fun little lark on the things you can tell about a person from their home & office stuff delivers instead a very shallow overview of the Big Five OCEAN personality traits, with a kind of disturbing failure to grasp the concept of personal space.
11. Thunder Rides a Black Horse, Claire R. Farrer: An overview of the Apache "Changing Woman" ceremony that inspires more unease in me about the role of women in Apache culture than respect.
12. Jewels, Victoria Finlay: A history of a sampling of gemstones, explored through one globetrotting site per gem, that benefits from stronger structure and focus than the author's previous work.
13. Kappa, Ryuunosuke Akutagawa: I wish I had more than headscratching to report from this fanciful tale of an author who visits a society of these legendary Japanese creatures, but, welp.
14. An Upriver Passamaquoddy, Allen Sockabasin: Some interesting material about contemporary Passamaquoddy life, but the amateur writing from a Maine chief inspires a lot a questions it doesn't answer.
15. Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons: Yeah, it's as game-changing and deep as you've heard.
16. The Gift of Fear, Gavin de Becker: Fuck you.
17. The Edge of the Sea, Rachel Carson: This look at ocean ecosystems from Carson, lavishly illustrated with line art by Bob Hines, is perhaps the most conventional of her books on the ocean but still not a bad exploration.
18. Silent Spring, Rachel Carson: Still scary after all these years, and an excellent example of how to take a scientific argument to the public.
19. The Sense of Wonder, Rachel Carson: Short paean to the importance of natural exploration in a child's life; personal, graceful, and a poignant synthesis of beauty with fact.
20. The Mansion in the Mist, John Bellairs: A disappointing young-adult adventure that's more slight than spooky and doesn't due justice to its Edward Gorey cover or the unusual friendship between adventurous boy and tough elderly librarian that I found so charming in The Dark Secret of Weatherend.
21. I'll Be Seeing You, Mary Higgins Clark (abridged audiobook): You're at the hospital, and your own corpse comes in - and thus ends the intriguing material in this wasteful thriller, where no good hook is left unexplored and the heroine's sleuthing has completely no impact on the plot.
22. The Cereal Murders, Diane Mott Davidson: Remember, kids: you can watch movies, but for God's sake, don't think or talk about them: "That kind of smart attitude can lose you some friends."
23. Planet Google, Randall Stross: Uncritical puff piece on Google's self-stated quest to "organize the world's information" (including a lot of your own, whether you want it to or not) is more ominous than heartening, and the author's frequent late-'90's swipes at Microsoft do nothing to distract from the unease.
24. Telling Stories the Kiowa Way, Gus Palmer Jr.: Intriguing exploration of the nuances, interactivity, and untranscribabilty of Kiowa storytelling that's undone a great deal by petty small-mindedness.
25. Trial by Ice: The True Story of Murder and Survival on the 1871 Polaris Expedition, Richard Parry (unabridged audiobook): Tale of murder on an Arctic expedition and the calamitous fallout hundreds of miles from civilization takes a bit to get going but is utterly gripping when it does.
26. Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China, James Fallows: Surprising and illuminating in parts, I guess (at least the parts where the author isn't banging on about his Presidential speechwriting not being properly credited on Wikipedia), but I wish we weren't still relying on self-absorbed white dudes to tell us about the ~mysterious, unfathomable Orient.~
27. Sailing Alone Around the World, Joshua Slocum (unabridged audiobook): A surprisingly personal account of what it says on the tin, and chummy, sunny reader Nelson Runger takes much of the edge off the account's archaic qualities.
28. Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck (unabridged audiobook): John Steinbeck single-handedly wins the civil rights movement by mildly telling off a racist hitchhiker; also, the sky is falling because America is becoming too sanitized, part 1,000/infinity.
29. Under the Tuscan Sun, Frances Mayes: A tale of learning to live in the rhythms of nature that overflows with lush prose and is one of the most sheerly beautiful books I've read - and nothing like a rom-com.
30. When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chodron: Uncomfortably vindictive and enamored with suffering for a Buddhist work, particular for one supposedly about how to recover from grief and loss.
31. The Job, Douglas Kennedy (abridged audiobook): Would-be Grisham knockoff that forgets to have a plot until the book's three-quarters over, additionally hobbled by a protagonist with an extraordinarily bad sense of decision-making.
32. Glock: The Rise of America's Gun, Paul Barrett: Insightful enough in revealing how Glock leveraged a savvy PR strategy unique in the industry to market dominance, and provides a side of corporate intrigue that's satisfyingly venal and honorless, but too fanboyishly enamored with the raw power of firearms to tackle the big questions of gun ownership it unwisely decides to settle Once and for All.
33. Japanese Religious Traditions, Michiko Yusa: Slim but efficient primer on Japanese religion with enough flavor to bring the subject to life.
34. The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching, Thich Naht Hanh: Warm & heartfelt primer on Buddhism that's a bit overwhelmingly dense and might run down too many concepts too quickly for beginners.
35. The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, Nicholas Meyer: Killer premise - what if Dr. Watson had to use Sherlock Holmes' own tools of ratiocination against him to save him from cocaine addiction? - that tragically turns into the dreariest of self-insert fanfics a third of the way through.
36. Why We Make Mistakes, Joseph T. Hallinan: Attractive test layout; forgettable and unilluminating contents.
37. Imagine: How Creativity Works, Jonah Lehrer: Intriguing look at the factors that supposedly foster creativity through a handful of well-known case studies (Bob Dylan, Pixar); I don't agree with all of Lehrer's conclusions, but the material is fresh and genuinely challenging.
38. Flourish, Martin Seligman: I think Seligman's genuinely onto something in this enhortation for everyday proactivity in one's search for happiness, but his argument is weirdly childish and snake oil-slick at times.
39. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Vol. 2 (from The Hound of the Baskervilles to The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes), Arthur Conan Doyle: Yeah, there're still some classic tales here and The Hound of the Baskervilles ain't bad, but Doyle's quality control kind of wandered off for the last couple collections, didn't it.
40. The Dark Half, Stephen King: Ably written but far more ashcan than scary.
41. Round Ireland with a Fridge, Tony Hawks: Hey, sorry, I got drunk and passed out; was I supposed to do something interesting for this book I'm writing?
42. Bella Tuscany, Frances Mayes: Falls into the trap avoided by its predecessor Under the Tuscan Sun of being a celebration of wealth and privilege rather than a celebration of nature and country living.
43. Impaired, Gaia Faye: Post-bad-end Silent Hill 4 fic that suffers from an unsatisfactory finish and lack of agency for the protag but has admirable ambition and good character moments. (Note for this journal: As is addressed in the linked review: Yes, I'm including a book-long SH4 fic in my reading list. If The Gift of Fear gets on, there's no excuse for this not to get on, too.)
44. How the Irish Saved Civilization, Thomas Cahill: Infantilizes the Irish instead of lauding them, and is far more interested in the Romans and St. Patrick than its premise; poorly paced and disingenuously argued.
45. Nemesis, Agatha Christie: Meh Miss Marple missing memorable moments.
46. Worlds of Power: Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, F. X. Nine: Remember: "They are all Draculas."
47. Some Good Will Boys, G. W. Hinckley: Turn-of-the-century collection of supposedly true stories of orphans at a outdoors-camp-slash-reform-school that seems both suspiciously scripted and lacking in a coherent point.
48. Wooden Leg: A Warrior Who Fought Custer, Wooden Leg: Excellent first-hand account of the Battle of Little Big Horn and Cheyenne life before and after reservation internment, written by the eponymous warrior, from an eminently readable and relatable first-hand perspective.
49. Water Shows the Hidden Heart, Roma Ryan: Allegorical odyssey through the stages of grieving by Enya's lyricist that boasts some evocative imagery but is raw, self-indulgent, and, at points, shallow.
50. Alphonse Mucha: Masterworks, Rosalind Ormiston: Collection of Mucha art with a surprisingly lengthy biography and exegesis of his works that could've used a bit less repetition and more insight in the latter portion of the proceedings.

Best books this year:

1. Wooden Leg: A Warrior Who Fought Custer, Wooden Leg: I wish more history were this personal, readable, and plain-spoken. The everyman's view of events at Custer's Last Stand (and before, and after) really give you insight into how the decisions were made that led to the event - on both the Indian and the U.S. sides.
2. The Sense of Wonder, Rachel Carson: Beautiful marriage of both Carson's ability to make science approachable to the layman and her capacity to craft lyrical prose, coalescing into a short but extremely effective and poignant paean.
3. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Vol. 1 (from A Study in Scarlet up to "The Adventure of the Second Stain"), Arthur Conan Doyle: But you knew about this.
4. Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons: You knew about this, too.
5. Under the Tuscan Sun, Frances Mayes: Surprisingly rich and celebrant, with gorgeous prose; nothing like a rom-com. (But the sequel is problematic.)

Worst books:

1. The Gift of Fear, Gavin de Becker: Truly vile rape apologia under the guise of empowerment, prefaced with one of the most blatantly evil acts to which I've been witness in a book. I don't care how many friends or bloggers have recommended this book to you: stay far, far away.
2. Anno Dracula, Kim Newman: A thin and often howlingly dumb Mary Sue fanfic with the author trying his clumsy best to name-check every vampire and Victorian intellectual property in creation, to absolutely no positive effect.
3. How the Irish Saved Civilization, Thomas Cahill: Doesn't address its ostensible premise until 2/3 of the way through, and then dwells on it for only half a chapter; spends most of its length into detours on the author's pet subjects; fails to inform the reader on the big picture regarding ; insults the very people it was purported to honor. An example from several angles on how not to write history.

I also don't know where to rank this, but though I don't feel When Things Fall Apart was written necessarily with malice in mind, it came across to me as a singularly nasty book, obsessed with demeaning the individual and with the only answer to suffering being more suffering. It's not Gift of Fear-level bad, certainly, but it was Up There in my list of unpleasant reading experiences.

Pleasant Surprises: Japanese Women was a much-needed exploration of right from the horses' mouths; would that there was a up-to-date version. Jewels had a few ugly moments but found its author more aware, on point, and genuinely informative than in her initial outing. Trial by Ice was a gripping and well-spun narrative of survival in the face of sabotage by human pettiness and stupidity.

Disappointments: Planet Narnia has an interesting theory but needs a better-organized, less apophenic author to argue it. Masquerade lacks confidence in its lead character and as a result finds its way to an unsatisfying ending. The Mansion in the Mist was a sedate letdown after reading its predecessor, a spooky kids' adventure hinged on an intriguing friendship.
Single biggest disappointment: The Seven-Per-Cent Solution had a smashing premise explored really well for the first third of the book, then was tossed aside for derivative self-insert fanfic that existed to debase the character of Sherlock Holmes. WTF, man.

Weird: Water Shows the Hidden Heart, with a lyricist trying to make a novel wholly out of imagery. An intriguing concept, but not one this particular author could sustain at full length, and the book as a whole seemed vanity-press raw. Kappa, for being Kappa.

Best quotes: When we confronted with life's difficulties, let us remember the immortal words of Worlds of Power: Castlevania II: Simon's Quest: "They are all Draculas."

Milestones: Finally read a Stephen King book; read through Sherlock Holmes. Finished the 50-book challenge, yay!

Dismal Percentages: Books by female authors: 18/50, or 36%. Books by nonwhite authors: 7/50, or 14%.
Number of times I was actively disappointed in a book: 27/50, or 54%.

I perhaps should shy away from including the Castlevania franchise three times in this feature, but its music encompasses some of the most memorable material in game scores. Video Game Music Daily, the site that inspired this mess, had the same problem; look at the size of its "castlevania" cloud tag compared to the others. What's remarkable is how many different composers have contributed cornerstones to the franchise: Ken'ichi Matsubara's "Bloody Tears" to Masanori Oodachi & Soutarou Tojima's "Simon's Theme" to Michiru Yamane's...well, everything. A landscape of mist-veiled mountains and haunted houses just seems to bring out the best in everybody.

Castlevania's music is so strong, in fact, that in recent years the Japanese end of the franchise seems to have been geared primarily to selling soundtracks, with gameplay a secondary consideration. No one can say that Judgment's arrangements of the old standards weren't the best part of that title, and much of Harmony of Despair's DLC consists of BGM. Then we have the Pachislot games, which have nearly no gameplay but manage to generate a soundtrack CD with every release. They still have original compositions, too - and they ain't bad.



That pause screen, yes, I know.

To the music, though, which is a celebration of adventure and excess. It's gothic, yet there's action and momentum. It has a degree of taste - but not enough, mind you, to employ any sort of restraint or tact. There are choirs and electric guitar and near-constant drums - and yet it's not a reckless full-frontal assault; all elements are carefully and effectively employed and balanced, to grand and intoxicating effect. This music wants the listener engaged, exhilarated, and having a great time.

The franchise's recent American adventures seem so frustrating due to their evident laziness - take a scrapped Lord of the Rings title, add some God of War ripoff gameplay, throw some money at Patrick Stewart (without writing anything worthy of an actor of his caliber), and voila. It's the triumph of money over ideas, all calculation and soullessness. While the Japanese division's commitment to producing actual games is certainly lacking, the U.S. folks could still stand well to take a few cues from the Nipponese music, which for a franchise so steeped in decay and death seldom fails to exhibit a boundless joie de vivre.
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