Here’s a nothing of a post for a moment. This post doesn’t have to be nothing. It could be a whole lot of things. It’s about time for another one of those Godzilla things, for instance. Or there’s a couple of those viral blog awards I need to get up on. Or there’s any of a hundred thoughts I have on the games I’ve been playing lately. There’s lots of things I could do.
But I happened to notice recently that after my most recent post, I had written a total of 399 posts for this blog. Which makes this post 400. A milestone, it feels like. And some might feel the need to mark that milestone by making something grand. But I feel like doing quite the opposite today. I want to celebrate my 400th post by doing something understated.
Which is odd for me. Few would describe me as shy. I am bold, and brash, and rakish, and sexy. I am out there and in your face and I love making my mark in the most spectacular way possible. But not today. Today, I’m just surprised it’s come this far. Because really, small as this blog’s readership is, it’s still an awesome thing that people come here and read it at all. Like, I am wise, but there’s wiser out there, talking about the same subject. I’m funny, but there’s funnier all over. I’m beautiful, and there’s nobody more beautiful, but it’s not like anyone gets to see me over the internet. And even so, my thoughts here mean enough to people that they take a bit of time out of their day to read over them and engage. All of you gift me with just a little bit of real estate in your minds, for just a bit of time. And that’s a powerful thing to me.
So really, 400 posts in, all content people have engaged with in some way, shape, or form. All of you, friends, fellow bloggers, commenters, and even you lurkers that don’t make your presence known but my stats show are consistently out there, thank you. Thanks for taking the time to read the random thoughts of one incredibly amazing and gorgeous soul at there in the sea of the same. I enjoy doing it, and knowing it’s got somewhere to be, that people are willingly taking it in, makes it all worthwhile.
Hope to keep great things for you going down the road.
You ever have those days where you’re just in a bad mood for no real reason? I’m hitting that right now. I’m generally pretty good-natured, because I am awesome at life so crappy things don’t come up that often. But, even if there’s nothing out there that can beat my shine, I guess the human psyche just needs to get in a funk every once in a while, because that’s where I’m at now. So, apropos of nothing, I’m just going to gripe for a bit here about some things that video games sometimes do that consistently ticks me off.
Let’s go.
Automatic Difficulty Adjustments
You know what’s a feature I’ve really come to love? Getting to change your difficulty at the start menu. Or even if a game just offers you the option to lower the difficulty a bit when you’re consistently getting your pleasantly shaped rear end handed to you. I don’t generally take it, but I both love challenging myself and hate getting stuck in a game and unable to advance, and this seems like a great solution to that. I’ve noticed I will more often plunge into the deep end of difficulty when I know I have the option to scale it back when things get too hot to handle. I always have to swallow my pride a bit to take it, but that’s generally a small price to pay to keep doing something I enjoy at an appropriate difficulty level for me.
But I hate when games just decide to do it for me.
I’ve been playing a fair bit of fighting games recently, where this feature seems common. You’re on a campaign, and you lose, and it just pulls the challenge back when you try again. Rinse and repeat until you get past it. Or, you select a difficulty level, but it actually starts you below that, and makes you earn your way up there. Which I find frustrating. Smash Bros aside, I am officially not good at fighting games. When I go up against the standard difficulty, I tend to lose a lot. Which is good. If I’m not losing at times, I’m not challenging myself, and that would mean I’m not getting better at the things I’m wanting to get better at. What I would like to be doing, when I hit a challenge that is too much for me, is to ram myself into it again and again until I get good enough to overcome it. But recent fighting games say no. You want to fight against a level that will test you, in the arcade/story/mission/campaign modes? You have to earn your way up there against the foes you know you can beat first, and then you only get one shot before we pull that away.
Now, sure, I could just go into the one off fights, where I get to chose the difficulty straight out, but that’s not as engaging to the way I want to play as the arcade modes. And I understand a bit of the motivation behind it. Fighting games are notoriously inaccessible, so having the mode the beginning players most gravitate towards have this on-the-fly performance-based difficulty so they’re sure to reach the ending with persistence makes sense. But I want to be able to turn it off. And I never seem to be able to.
Forced Grinding
I’ve griped about this a couple of times before. So, probably nothing new here. But I’m ranting, so I’m going to rant.
I think I’ve figured out why I don’t mind the grinding in Disgaea as much as I do in pretty much anything else. In most games, when its grinding time, you just end up mindlessly milling through combat over and over, fighting the same enemies in the same areas with nothing really stimulating occuring. Disgaea on the other hand, puts you into a new challenge area. It requires mental engagement, although you might be doing it to grind you have a goal beyond the grinding itself, and you get a sense of progress beyond just watching numbers go up. You might be stepping into grinding in Disgaea, but it’s not just grinding. You have things to do beyond that, and the grinding just happens incidentally.
More games need to do that. I find myself suffering through the end game of Xenoblade Chronicles, in which the enemies of the final area are of a much, much higher level than anything you ran across before, coupled with a mechanic that if an enemy is five levels above you, you just don’t get to hit them anymore. So bam. Hit the final area, you have to spend several hours grinding your levels up so you can actually defend yourself against the enemies your stats say you should do just fine against. So just hours I’ve spent, running in circles, fighting the same enemies over and over again, barely paying attention to what had formerly been an incredible game for the first two thirds of it. I despise it when games waste my time, and especially so when they seem deliberately designed to do so. The only reason I stuck it out was because I’d already invested 60 hours into it, but even so, it killed all the good will I had left for the rest of the game.
So. Forced grinding. Don’t do it.
Player Controlled Suicide
I loathe when this comes up. Superhot does it. Superhot VR does it so much worse. Yandere Simulator does it. Distraint does it. Spec Ops: The Line does it, albeit only in a route choice there. Situations where a player character is going to suicide, and you have to press the buttons to do it to advance.
It disgusts me. And I admit that’s because it hits my personal triggers. It bothers me in a way that controlling other video game violence does not. Not because I think it’s especially harmful; much like garden variety video game violence isn’t going to lead to real world violence where that tendency isn’t already there, simulated suicide isn’t going to lead to suicidal ideation away from those who are already in deep. But it does rub against my personal values so hard to be in control of an avatar’s suicide that I find it sickening.
So, look. Video games often involve simulated violence. And generally, if I’m not up for the particular violence a game has to offer, that particular implementation of simulated violence is made apparent before I make a purchasing decision. So I can choose the content I expose myself to. There’s never any warning about being put behind a suicide. That’s always just thrown at you. And that’s not how it should be.
Impatient Reminders
You spend enough time playing games, you develop a set of instincts around them. One of those instincts is if you get given a quest arrow pointing you someplace, you check out absolutely everywhere else you have access to before you follow the quest arrow. That’s just how these things work. When there’s somewhere you’re clearly supposed to go, you actually want to go everywhere else first. Because that’s where all the cool treasure is.
That’s all well and good. But apparently, some developers thought it’d be a good idea to make their games bug you about that quest arrow. Like, some people’s jobs were to program the game’s AIs to get impatient with you. That’s a thing they did with their lives. So you get persistent in your face reminder text of what your supposed goal is when you’re rifling through side rooms looking for cool loot. NPCs start bugging you about how you’re having fun slaying random jobbers instead of pressing a button to do something you’re not ready to do yet. The game itself will give you grief for trying to explore the setting fully rather than seeking the next event flag directly. As if you don’t know what you’re doing.
You know what? They can all just take a chill pill. I’m being thorough. Because you find some sweet item in one out of the way place, that’s going to spur you to check them all. Progress is often the enemy of sweet loot.
Not Being Mr. Shifty
This is something I didn’t notice games did, until I tried out the game Mr. Shifty, but it really opened my eyes. You know how, every once in a great while, a game comes out that does something unique, creative, and interesting that ends up moving the genre or the whole medium forward? Super Mario Bros. did it with the scrolling screen. Mario 64 did it with effective 3D game play. Final Fantasy VII did it with the cinematic storytelling abilities with games. Mr. Shifty does it with being Mr. Shifty.
Since I played Mr. Shifty, I really started noticing how much most games are not Mr. Shifty. I’ll pick up a random game, play it for a while, and I might have a good time with it, but I’ll be realizing just how much Mr. Shiftiness it lacks. I’ll be like, “Man, this plot is deep, and this gameplay is solid, but I’d like to be able to Mr. Shifty it up right now.” But I can’t. Because even though Mr. Shifty offers an excellent example of how to incorporate being Mr. Shifty into your game, so far, developers don’t seem to be picking it up adequately, sticking with the tried-and-true, traditional but inferior ways of not being Mr. Shifty. We can only hope the medium picks it up with time.
Our destinies intertwined. Fate had posed us against each other. Our titanic battle sent shockwaves blasting across the seas of time. Nothing has been the same, since then.
And now, we’re going to do it again.
Some of you who’ve been following the blog for a while, or plunging into the archives, or who might otherwise call yourselves “Aether Historians” might recall the first time Lost to the Aether faced off with our fated rival, the always-in-development murder playground known as Yandere Simulator. The feud everyone finding my blog through a search as well as destiny itself demanded. Our clash was titanic. My victory, overwhelming. So overwhelming, in fact, that it actually made the search terms for this blog normal for a good long while. Which was something I wasn’t prepared for, really. C’mon guys, let’s get this stuff weird again.
Anyways, in case you missed it, we just finished up October. Which is a well-regarded time for getting into spooky/horror media, and I got caught up in that myself. Wanted to pick myself up a good horror game. And coincidentally, at the same time, Yandere Simulator came out with a big content update. The game’s been in development for seven years by this point, and the developer feels that he’s almost ready to complete the game, having got about everything done that he can on his own. But to really get the game finished, he’ll need to hire people to do the parts of it outside of his capabilities, which will require a crowdfunder, but after the standard cycles of long development time plus short internet patience, he feels he’s not poised for a successful crowdfunder right now. So, in order to demonstrate the product and build up faith and interest in it again, he’s used the assets he currently has to develop a full story mode for the game, for the first time. Albeit not the story mode everyone was expecting. That’s the one he needs to hire people to do the animations and the voice acting and the whatnot for. Rather, we’ve got a fully-fledged prequel story mode.
Anyways, I was looking for something horror-themed to play, and a game where you’re basically a horror-movie villain sounded pretty solid to me at the time. And I can get behind the idea of putting out a show of good faith for your audience, work to show you’re taking them seriously with a lot of new content. And besides, it was probably my victory over this game years ago that cost it a lot of it’s positioning. So I figured it’d be a good time to jump back into it, and see just how much the game has grown since I defeated it last time. We’re still fated opponents, but maybe destined rivals this time, rather than enemies.
Here we go. For a good comparison to our old post, rather than jumping in to the prequel story mode, I’m going to be going for the main, incomplete story. Because that’s what we did last time. The full game will have ten rivals, but the current edition only has one that’s fully set up, so only a single level’s equivalent of content. But that’s fine for the sample we’re going for. After all, I’m trying to make amends, of some sort. Don’t want to crush this game too fully again.
Starting up, the first thing it has you do is customize your senpai, the absolutely heartthrob that will be the subject of your and at least ten other girls’ affections. I love customizing characters, and I know super well what makes the female mind fall in love with someone, so you can rest assured that I will create a being who is the pinnacle of attractiveness.
And there. There he is. Ladies, you may take a number, and form a line to your left. He won’t have time for you all but don’t worry, there will be consolation prizes.
And then we get a cutscene detailing the premise of the game. So, if you’ve spent too much time around certain parts of the internet, like, you know, this blog, you’ve probably heard of a few of the ‘dere’ types of characters in Japanese fiction. Yanderes are characters that seem sweet and lovely, but then turn around and inflict horrific violence out of a hidden insanity driven by their affection. Or something like that. People find that attractive, apparently. I’ve got at least two posts on this blog touching on that. Well, three now, I guess. Anyways, that’s us. We’re one of those. We spend our whole life feeling nothing, until one day, we run into senpai. Then all of a sudden, a feeling blossoms through. Complete, all-encompassing love. Or something that ol’ Yan-chan confuses for it.
Anyways, Yan-chan is so enraptured by that feeling that she immediately resolves to inflict bloody horrors on anyone who gets between her and the object of her affection.
So she stalks him. Some other girl catches her doing so, and texts her some information on another girl with designs on him. And kind of encourages her to take drastic action.
I’m guessing there’s lots of people in this scenario that could use a bit of professional help.
And with that, we’re in the game proper. We start off in our bedroom, with a few interactables, but so far, only one that’s really meaningful, an anime we can watch to teach us new murder methods. Which seems kind of inappropriate for a high schooler, frankly. From there, I can check out the basement, so I do so, and find it a perfectly equipped murderhole. Also has a cassette tape in there, of which I can figure out no way to play. Because it’s 2022. Who has cassette players anymore?
I do. In my car. In the real world. Aether. That’s who.
Anyways, not a lot to do at home, so I head to school. I get there, and immediately make two impressions. The first, last time I played the game, going to school meant I spawned in with the camera buried underground and staring up my own skirt. That seems to have been corrected in the years since then. And second, holy hades are there a lot of people now. I find myself in the midst of a sea of students. All of them individually designed, and as I find out through playing the game further, all of them with their own schedules and pathing. That’s an impressive thing to see coming together, really.
This is my first time with full control here, so I start messing around, seeing what all the buttons do. I find a button that makes me laugh. This creeps out everyone around. I do it again. Senpai hears that time. And my laugh was apparently so creepy that he never wants anything to do with me again. I got a game over within like thirty seconds of starting the game proper. Harsh.
Ok, starting that over again. This time, no laughing in public. I start formulating a plan. But not much of one. First step is to find my rival/target. I do this quickly, as she’s talking to senpai just off the walkway into school. Second step is to find a reason to… you know, do something about her. Because although Yan-chan is down for wanton murder, Aether’s really not. I have a hard time playing the bad guy in games, particularly when it comes to inflicting horrors on the innocent. Like, I don’t have any moral compunctions with it, really; I’m not sinning by having my electronic avatar commit simulated violence on collected bits of graphics and ai mechanics or anything, but it does require going somewhere that just doesn’t come naturally to me. I usually go for the super good moral choices in games. That’s just more satisfying to me.
Lost to the Aether 