Posts
Death in Storytelling
Spoilers, people die. You also die at the end of your life. Broadly speaking across the entirety of human history we only know of one man who was capable of coming back from death, and even then it's contested whether or not that such an event even happened. Yet, in the land of fiction, such restrictions do not apply and you're free to whisk people to and fro the land of death like it's absolutely nothing. That's not necessarily a bad thing, I've seen quite a few good stories where people don't die, either through true immortality or some sort of limbo state. Usually these stories tend to have a sense for the value of life, and more importantly the...
Metroidvania Analaysis
Depending on who you ask, metroidvanias are either the first or second most obnoxiously named genre in close competition with soulslikes. The term is completely meaningless to most and the best you can hope to understand about metroidvanias is that they are inspired by Metroid and Castlevania. What is a metroidvania really? Does it have to be limited to such a static and boring amount of inspirations? Let's talk. First off where exactly does this stupid name come from? Well, Nintendo made Metroid, and Metroid had an interesting gameplay style that was based around getting powerups and using those powerups to unlock new areas throughout a giant level. Was Nintendo the first to do this? No, and many people who...
Bad Review Stagnation
Reviews can be a lot harder to make than you might think. Good reviews can be incredibly in-depth, spanning hundreds of pages to acknowledge all facets of the work, its inspirations, and its legacy. Bad reviews can be incredibly dismissive, revelling in their purely negative cynicism and often coming across like little more than hatred no matter how much the reviewer tries to argue otherwise. Bad reviews can also lead to fear on the creator's part, which is probably why everything seems like it's stagnated so much these days. People are afraid of bad reviews. Bad reviews mean bad thing, and it means less people are interested which means less money which means less ability to create other things. But...
Snakes on a Plane Review
Snakes on a Plane is a film about Snakes on a Plane featuring Samuel L Jackson and a bunch of other people who aren't cool enough to be known on a first name basis. In it, a bunch of Snakes on a Plane get really violent for some reason and ravage the entire crew and passengers. The film makes absolutely no sense at all, but what do you expect from watching a film called Snakes on a Plane? So yeah, the premise real quick. Some guy (I did not remember anyone's names in this film) saw something he really, really shouldn't have seen: mobsters committing an oopsie daisy murder. Samuel L. Jackson saves Some Guy from an unexpected lead donation...
Forgiveness for Failure
Saw some channel that talks about arcade games. Arcade game players, undoubtedly being the ones who've been shafted most by the trends of both high-budget blockbusters and rinky dink one man crafts, tend to have pretty big and loud opinions and those opinions basically boil down to "pls make gaem more like arcade". This works better for some genres than others, but the notion is understandable especially in the face of games that get way too overbloated with meaningless shit that detract from the experience. Typically this will involve arguments for games having more punishing death mechanics. Arcade games often involved such punishing death mechanics that, if you were to fail hard enough, you would be forced to replay the...