Game Motive vs. Story Motive

A bit of a followup to my last post, which was a little schizophrenic in hindsight but I think I got the point across in some way. The plot of Mario games are usually pretty simple, you want to go save someone from Bowser so you jump across a lot of things to do that. The thing is, I don’t really care about Mario’s problems because Mario is a fictional character who lives in a fantasy land filled with nonsensical bullshit. How exactly does a game reconcile the differences between what I care about and what Mario cares about?

The Game Is Fun

“The game, is fun. The game, is a battle. If the game is not fun, why bother?” These are the words Reggie said around E3 2017, and in an era where bad time wasting movie games were starting to kick off Reggie singlehandedly handwaved the entire movement with that quote and the moviegames crowd has never came up with a proper response to it since. Now on the verge of bad triple A trash bombing left and right from forgetting the core fundamentals of ‘fun’, we have to ask ourselves why he was so right and what it tells us about games.

Accessibility Gone Wrong

Accessibility has been a pretty commonly brought up topic in the world of vidyerjames relatively recently, with some big names attempting to implement more and more features to make their games more accessible to wider audiences. This is generally speaking a good thing, but alongside these attempts to make games more accessible to a variety of audiences came a lot of really stupid shit getting shoved in under the guise of ‘accessibility’, and that’s the stuff we’re going to be talking about today.

Yellow Paint Problems

Many game devs, most notably Capcom with their recent remakes, have made pretty baffling decisions around the artistic direction of their games. On certain objects of importance or in areas of importance, yellow paint gets smeared on something to indicate that you can interact with it, or to give an important hint. In these otherwise very realistic looking games, it begs the question of who puts the yellow paint there (the developers), what his purpose is (being an obnoxious guide), or how it got there to begin with (hastily done last minute texture editing).

Roguelites Analysis

Roguelites are a genre based on roguelikes that are primarily based around stripping away certain facets of the roguelike genre in order to fit the remainders into various different genres, and as a result it’s developed into quite a divisive descriptor for what’s become a very popular subset of indie games. I’m going to attempt what’ll be a pretty shallow overview of roguelites as a whole and why they’re so popular.

Removing Nekoweb's Sitebox Preview Screenshot

I have to update my site to add a few things anyways so I might as well throw this old note on here. That and I’ve seen people screw it up a lot. This might technically be a small web reactionary post but it’s important for people to understand so I’m gonna post it anyway.

First off, let’s explain how the user expects a sitebox to work. By default, you have the screenshot, text, and subtext underneath. Clicking on the screenshot, text, and subtext sends you to the site. Pretty simple, right?

Poptropica Review

Poptropica is a browser game by Scholastic and that guy who did the Diary of a Wimpy Kid novels made to capitalize on browser games right as the Iphone was taking off. In spite of this it surprisingly did pretty well, at least up until flash’s popularity began to wane and they eventually moved to pretty much shutter the entire thing, only living on through archived copies and the Coolmathgames website where for some reason you’re still allowed to play it to this day, albeit without the full set of islands to enjoy.

New Layout

It’s done. Took longer than it really should have but it’s done. I went through too many ideas to count but ultimately wanted to end up on something that was readable and serviced its main purpose well rather than having a bunch of random shit that’s there for the sake of sparkling. I’m honestly not sure what else I could add, I’ve looked around and considered ideas for what else I could add but really nothing popped out to me.