Belinkie: Ditto!

Have you played the new Mega Man game? I may be a noob, but that shit is HAAARD.

After watching ten minutes of gameplay on YouTube, I’m prepared to say that A Boy In His Blog is a brilliant concept, but the execution is so poor that the whole thing washes out to a big “eh.” It does not look fun, at all. That being said, I remember it fondly, so you’re right – maybe back then, we were all willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.

But, as I said (and I haven’t listened to the review), it’s really really hard.

And also it’s one of those games that kind of requires you to know how to beat it in order to beat it, like a lot of older games that were designed for a bleaker, more existential video game world.

It feels a lot like an old school text adventure — impossible without a walkthrough, and even with a walkthrough, pretty difficult, but possessed of a certain sublimated nightmarishness that is interesting and fun in its own way.

We’ve all been spoiled by more contemporary video games. I mean, I remember Dragon Warrior. I remember the original Final Fantasy. Those games were some boring isht.

Oh, I loved them, and I played the Hell out of them, but they were horribly paced and just heaped a whole lot of unnecessary suffering on the player.

And those were the huge monster hits. Stuff like A Boy and His Blob had different sorts of expectations associated with it, especially as a child more of the Atari style of gaming than of Nintendo, with its funky music and iconic, bouncy control style.

So, it’s a bit of revisionist history to just call it blanket terrible without acknowledging the sense of novelty and exitement that surrounded it at the time and in its popular legacy.

It was a really cool game, but really really hard. I think it was by the same guy as Pitfall, which explained a lot of the design choices (like the juxtaposition of above-ground and subterranean areas on the same screen) and the insane difficulty.

I played both Max Payne games on PS2 and enjoyed them marvelous much. What lee meant, I think, was that it was ORIGINALLY a game. It’s a movie based on a game. Or, well, maybe two games- I haven’t seen it (yet), so I can’t base anything on how “true to the plot” the movie is. As such, it’s probably expected that it will be rather “hoakey” and ridiculous. Games aren’t the same as movies- when playing a game, the audience has agency (or at least is made to feel that way), becomes a participant. With movies, the audience is completely a spectator.

What this brings up for me, though, is whether there is a degree of separation or any allowance given because of this difference. Should it be held to a different standard because its concept comes from a game versus an original concept of film? Should the use of bullet-time in a game versus a movie be different?