i game therefore i am

[amovingtarget]

Belated post about games I have played and had thoughts about. One unfinished, one... abandoned for the foreseeable future, two completed. There will be some mentions of death and suicide under the cut for What Remains of Edith Finch, just so you're aware.

There are also two games that I dipped my toes into:

Sonic Mania which was a nice trip down memory lane, but actually infuriating to try to play because I have maybe half the hand eye coordination I had as a kid and that's not saying a lot.

Overcooked which I was 100% charmed by but is also infuriating to play without at least one person to help you, so maybe I'll invest in a second controller and rope in a nibling to play with me over the summer holidays.

Hitman (2016) played 09 March, 16 - 25? April INCOMPLETE
I found this quite interesting to play. It's a little lighter on story than what I'm used to -- so far, anyway -- but the cinematics between missions feel really well scripted and they look gorgeous, really movie-like. It's all solo work, so there's less interaction between characters than I'd like.

It does the basics well, I think, regarding gameplay and it's actually kind of staggering how many different ways you have to execute a mission, and the way things happen in the game whether you are doing things or not. There was a moment in the Sapienza mission, where I finally con and sneak my way into the basement lab and find a piece of intel that tells me a way to destroy the virus. There's a note saying that the person who has the password dongle to the fail-safe laptop has 'gone to church'. I leave the basement -- assuming that I have triggered that opportunity by seeing the intel -- find the church, hang around for a while, look all around the place, outside it, under it. I finally realise that the whole time I was doing other stuff, the scientist had gone and come back and got back to work, so I had to google where she was in the lab and how to identify her, otherwise I would never know. That's really cool and I'm hoping to get around to finishing this at some point...

Days Gone played 26 April - 14 May INCOMPLETE
I was really excited for this game, or at least, I was definitely waiting a long time for this. I preordered it back in the winter of 2017, pretty much off the back of nothing but the E3 reveal. I got a little more, um, scared of it earlier this year when I realised just how many zombies the game would have, because the early trailers focused on the open world aspect of it, but! I was still excited when it finally arrived.

I have to admit that right from the start I wasn't very impressed with the writing. There's a prologue that is quite like the one from The Last of Us, except the dialogue made me cringe a little for some reason, and it didn't really improve. Once we skip through to the post apocalypse actual game setting, there's a neat little counter in the menus and your save files that tells you how many days gone you are from the end of the world -- or maybe the day you lost the love of your life -- but it doesn't seem to inform anything about the game or the characters.

I did really like the way they layered storylines together, so that when you do one mission, you might be learning things about several different plot threads, instead of the traditional separate questlines. I'd like to see something like that in more games, though there's room for improvement there as well -- because the writing fell short, it sometimes felt a little bit gimmicky.

One thing I will never understand about games is why they make you take control of characters doing nothing besides walking from one cinematic to another? I always figure it's some kind of covert loading mechanism, but, come on, just make it a whole cutscene, you cowards.

Also, I don't like the horde idea, personally, because, well... see my earlier point about too many zombies. It got more annoying still when I accidentally stumbled onto one and they chased me all the way back to a camp and not only can you not hide, but you have to work with a fucking stamina meter and hope that when you run out you have enough of a lead to get through the cooldown what the fuck... Speaking of camps, I don't feel like they added very much of anything to the story. I don't know why I feel like they were a bit of a waste, I'm sure there are good reasons for having them, even just mission pick ups... but, I don't know.

And then there's the minimap! You think you're so close to something when you're on your bike, but no, you get off to harvest things or whatever and you're miles and miles and miles away. Getting around open world maps is tedious enough without having to get on and off my bike every six seconds because the map is... like that. And there's also bears and wolves to fight, and zombie bears and wolves to fight! Fun for all the family!

Anyway. I got... maybe half way into the story? There was this bit that's kind of like an open air dungeon crawl, and it's the first time machine gun wielding enemies show up (iirc) and I'm managing just about, but when I'm trying to sneak through the tall grass to avoid them on my way to a story target, they keep finding me? There's not even an awareness metre (I don't know if this was a bug) they just suddenly spot me, and they keep killing me in like three hits. And I knew there was a boss waiting for me at the end of this sequence, and I knew somewhere along the way that I'd have to face a horde to continue the story, and I knew I was barely liking the story in the first place, and I just... gave up.

I did watch it on youtube the rest of the way, to see if it improved any. I supposed the ending was alright, and it was nice to find Sarah and see how amazing she is in general, but mostly it was just too fucking long. I don't know if my attention span has complete gone down the drain or if the pacing of this game was legitimately that terrible.

Final Fantasy 8 played 14 May - 12 June

Tough to be playing an old game, having to keypress to keep the dialogue moving, and the steam keyboard controls for this one are terrible, but I will freely admit that I fell in love with Quistis first because of this gem: Quistis: "You're the squad leader. Good luck to you." Seifer: "...Instructor. I hate it when people wish me luck. Save those words for a bad student that needs them, eh?" Quistis: "Okay then. Good luck, Seifer." I like her, and Zell, and Selphie, and Squall too -- there wasn't much to him to begin with except that he's in hardcore loner mode, but I trusted there was interesting backstory here that would come out. I remember wanting to play it a long time ago -- I almost had the chance when I saw it at a friend's place more than a decade ago now, but I didn't have the time -- and being interested in him from the FMV alone, but at the start he does seem pretty cold sometimes. Poor Quistis.

Finding Biggs and Wedge was fun too, and the story -- and the animation especially -- is full of cute little nonsense moments. After that, it was the Diablos battle, which took me a bunch of tries to get through -- even after I found out about the trick of using Blind on him, he still somehow managed to hit two characters in a row, but! I persevered! and I beat him! And then we were off to Timber and I've played through that flashback(?) with Laguna, who is 200% dork, it's amazing.

I was determined to try and do a 100% playthrough in one go, and I found a walkthrough to get me through it, because I'd already given up on Days Gone and Final Fantasy can be pretty convoluted to get through, in my (limited) experience. I didn't want to miss anything, including the Triple Triad card games, which I enjoyed at first, but then I lost my Ifrit card almost the minute I got it. The walkthrough was all "play it! it's cool! it's fun! challenge this and this person and get some cool cards!" and I was like, yeah I will! but it was only my third card game! So... I didn't play any more games after that, though I did love using the card ability to turn enemies into Triple Triad cards. (^_^;)

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I thought the junction system was pretty cool once I got used to it. The menu system, and having to go back and forth a million times, was hellish, but I liked being to get really high stats with a few keypresses, without having to level grind.

It was pretty fun to meet Rinoa -- and her dog, who is her actual limit break mechanic, I can't even! -- and then I spent an ungodly amount of time trying to do the train sequence. Bless this game though, at least it was kinder than most modern games are. There's a five minute time limit, and I failed once and it was like okay here's an extra minute, and I failed again and it was like, wow okay here's an extra hour. Keyboard controls showed themselves up as especially shitty in this part too, and I had to change them to the numberpad to match the numbers I was supposed to be putting in for the codes to even stand a chance because the keyboard keys were X, C, V, and S and that makes zero kind of sense at all.

I love the little blocky animations. Is this the first time they use idle animations in a game? because I noticed and it definitely made me nostalgic. Rinoa gets a lot of these -- moments I loved in particular were: she tells Irvine to stop trying to act so cool and hurry up, and she kicks him down the stairs; another one much later in a flashback where she shoves him back into a car (or was it a tank? something like that anyway) and goes careening off in it; an earlier one where she's peeking at the others to see how she should salute while pretending to be SeeD.

About halfway through the game I hit F2 by accident when I went to turn the 'hispeed' mode on, and it was a while before I realised that I had accidentally turned on a 'battle assist' instead. That was the point I realised there were built in cheats for the game and I hesitated for all of two seconds before I started using them with impunity.

I did all the sidequests I could manage. Shumi Village wasn't too bad. The chocobo forest puzzles were a massive pain. The optional GFs: King Tonberry (easy), Odin (a pain), Cactuar (easy), Doomtrain (a pain, but only because I had to farm a million marlboro tentacles), Bahamut (easyish?).

The very worst thing was having to get energy crystals to get Squall's and a couple of others' ultimate weapons. The wiki said I can get them from behemoths and I can find them in the Deep Sea Research levels, and I thought that was fine because I wasn't having much luck encountering them anywhere else and I wanted to go there to get Bahamut anyway! So I went and it took me a while to figure out how to get down there, but sure enough three fixed encounters that I could farm, except I wasn't getting any energy crystals. Go back to google and find out it's a rare drop, and I thought, that's okay! I have Bahamut and I can cheat to get all the abilities and I can use the Rare Item ability to get it! Still no joy and then google tells me that the ability is bugged so that rare items are even more difficult to get!!! Fuck my life. So I take it off and try some more and I still don't get any! That's when I find out that the place to farm energy crystals was a fixed energy encounter in Esthar City which -- after running around trying to find the damn thing, why does this game have such strangely complicated layouts, ugh -- did the trick, and then I had everyone kitted out in almost no time at all.

I admit, I had a bit of a difficult time with the plot. I found it both enjoyable and bemusing. This is only the fourth? Final Fantasy I've played and they don't tend to go into the characters as deep as I wish they would, even though -- or because -- I like the characters, and the plot isn't always well explained, even though I generally find them interesting. Was Ultimecia's goal of time compression really just for the evulz? Why wasn't Rinoa's relationship with Seifer ever mentioned again after she said she thought she might have been in love with him, while they thought he was dead. I was super interested about that -- especially when Seifer said his dream was to be a Sorceress' knight. Knowing a little about the story from a million years ago, I wondered if Rinoa being a Sorceress had already been established, except maybe a secret, and Ultimecia had just co-opted the idea that Seifer wanted to be Rinoa's knight. He obviously got her into the Garden, as well, so she could get Cid's and SeeD's help with the resistance and it sounded like he was sympathetic to the cause, or at least to Rinoa's feelings, which was at odds with how he's presented otherwise. I must have missed a sidequest or optional conversation that explained just how Laguna and co. defeated Adel and punted her into space, or why he stayed in Esthar as president. I also missed the fact Squall was Laguna and Raine's child, thinking that he only called Ellone sis well, because they were both orphans together. I'm pretty sure the other party members called her that too. After it's revealed that using GFs were making them forget things from their past, I don't think it was ever discussed that hey, we're actually siblings! In fact, I thought Rinoa was Laguna's daughter with Julia and the General had married her after she learned she was pregnant, which might have had something to do with the terrible relationship they had, and I kept waiting for something to come of that, but I was wrong, I guess. I also feel like I lost track of where Ellone was supposed to be at any given time, but I suppose that was kind of the point.

It doesn't surprise me that I hit peak relatability with Squall when I saw him looking at his little miserable, lonely self like he was something pitiful. It was pretty wonderful to see the jerkass facade crack. Speaking of which, I don't think I bought into Squall and Rinoa's love story as much as I should have either, or as much as I wanted to. It reminded me a little of the way people didn't buy into Noct/Luna either, but I did because -- thank you modern graphics -- I could see the way they looked at each other. I still adored the little moments though when he realised he was having feelings and he didn't understand what they were, when he just threw her onto his back and ran off to figure out how to save her, when he had stopped for a minute and admitted he was just acting unfriendly because he didn't want to care about people -- and then says to her comatose self, to not tell anyone he said that. And then there was that moment on the Ragnarok which I loved to pieces. It would make a lovely remake with a modern engine.

Speaking of which! I can't believe they announced a console remaster the same day I was about to finish the game on the shitty Steam port! I was right there on the doorstep of Ultimecia's castle!!! Fuck my life.

Squall's smile at the end though... Worth it.

What Remains of Edith Finch played 13 June

I really enjoyed this, in a manner of speaking, in that it was a great story and an extremely well formed game. It was also probably not the game I should have played the day after I spent the night both wanting and being afraid to die. There's a lot of death in this game. Lewis' story did trigger some suicidal thoughts, although that may have been because they have been too close to begin with, but it's still my favourite because of the art shifts, the way it goes from 2D to 3D, black and white to colour, and because it does a... painfully good job of describing depersonalisation.

I briefly wondered if the Edie who was narrating wasn't the one we were playing, because something about Lewis' story confused me, or... possibly I was too upset and wasn't thinking clearly... and even though it turned out that the narrator wasn't the same character we started with, or that we end with, it wasn't at all in the way I was thinking -- which was that maybe the narrator was Edie Finch, and the player character was the daughter retracing her steps, but then I realised that the layout of the family tree and the dates on it would make no sense. Of course, we can't be sure at all that what we're seeing or hearing is true, given the nature of the storytelling, and I read a theory that maybe Edie actually murdered her children, and eventually groomed her granddaughter Dawn to help her, which is a pretty fucking creepy spin on the whole game.