hello, sorry for not updating for a while. todays discussion topic is on my own view on comparing video game favorites (can also to apply to other art).
i am someone who tends to rate nearly every piece of art i consume on a 1-10 scale. so eventually i came to the question of "how do i compare every video game to
very different video games with very different appeals on some universal scale?" afterall, how are you supposed to compare ddr to telltales the walking dead?
it doesn't really make much sense as the appeals are very different.
the conclusion i ultimately came to on this is that i rate in terms of impact. the rating indicates how much the game impacted me in any way.
for example lets take my 9/10 rating for tetris. can i point out any flaws in tetris? not really, but it didnt really impact me on a 10/10 level. now a 9/10 is still an
extremely high level of impact, and the way it impacted me was by being fun. being something i could zone out and play for hours. the impact lies in the fun.
in comparison, saya no uta is another game ive given a 9/10, but its impact lies in other areas. its a visual novel that managed to horrify me with pure disgust
nearly the whole way through, the way urobuchi describes the way things feel actually nauseated me. the games messaging about how humans will fight for
the little bit they personally have left rather than giving up the rest of their life for some morally good cause also taught me a lot.
which brings me to the main thing ive been thinking about lately, which is the question of what my favorite game even is. a difficult question to answer.
the two candidates are omori and muramasa the demon blade. lets talk about muramasa first. muramasa is a game that basically taught me how a 10/10 game
really felt to me personally. the entire game is gorgeous, i find the combat extremely satisfying, the music is good and the story is very playful. but the real thing
that hooked me in was really just how running straight across these empty fields felt strangely like the most adventurous a video game had ever felt to me. to this
day i have never really forgotten that feeling. thats how it impacted me. muramasa is not just a game with an ultra strong impact, but also an experience i cant
remember disliking a single thing about.
omori is game with a lot of strengths. incredible art, incredible music, one of the most solid rpg cores ive ever played, an endlessly charming main campaign with
a ton of interesting side content. but unlike muramasa, it has a lot of flaws to me. the difficulty is too easy in most parts, there are some dungeon puzzles that are
really uninteresting, and despite the game being 99% perfectly written, there is a little bit of cringeworthy dialogue thrown in there also with stuff no human being
would ever say. however, id say omori impacted me a lot more than muramasa, and thats because of its incredible story, that i personally think impacted me more
than any other story ive ever experienced, which is why i gave the game a 10/10 despite all the flaws i mentioned.
i think omori, despite all the problems i can point out with it, is the game that has impacted me the most, a pretty big amount more than any other video game ive
ever played, which is why im okay with saying its my favorite game of all time.
to bring it all back around, im sure you can see the theme here. i can rate all these games i appreciate so much on the same scale because even if they impacted
me differently, i can still weigh all those impacts in the same way.
so today i just wanted to talk a bit about survival games, and my own personal thoughts on them.
recently, i have been playing a game called project zomboid, im still very new to it and its been a really tough experience, but i dont necessarily think something
being a tough experience makes it bad or anything. sometimes it's good to lose a ton of times and to be able to learn from all those experiences until you become
a good player. what i do have a problem with though, at least personally, is this overall confusion as to what im actually supposed to be doing.
like i get that the point is to just survive for as long as possible, but i guess it contradicts what i like so much about most of the games i play. i like feeling like im
progressing to some sort of main objective in most complex games, its what keeps the game hooking me. when you have so many systems, mechanics, and
ideas in your game, but not a lot of stuff you can really tangibly do with them, that becomes a problem to me.
now, for a way to do not having a goal right, take a look at minecraft. minecraft, from a players perspective, is a really simple game. theres a ton of items and
blocks to collect, but overall the core game is extremely simple. that makes actually choosing to do what you want to do way less overwhelming and way more
streamlined, but the amount you can do within that simple system of placing blocks is where the fun really lies for minecraft.
now, back to zomboid. finding out what you can actually do in zomboid is really complicated, all the systems constantly overwhelm the player and its really hard
to decide what you want to do without any sort of goal. if there were core goals in zomboid that were able to do more obvious and tangible things, i think that
might make it more interesting for me personally. i get that the point of zomboid is to feel like a very true survival game, not really a game about any type of
progression, but that doesnt really appeal to me. it just overwhelms me for little payoff, its too complicated to not have any reward.
to wrap it back around to the general topic of survival games, the ones that tend to be interesting to me follow a common theme of having a simple core
mechanic that still has a lot of depth to it and that justifies the lack of a real goal. if you're going to make a super complicated game with 20 billion systems,
give me goals to work with so that i dont constantly feel like im never doing enough to engage with all those systems to maximize my efficiency.
welcome to neocrystal. this is just a thing i wanted to do for fun, this page is basically just a blank slate for me to write about anything thats interesting to me,
where i can openly talk without character limits or proper formatting on any specific subject. i dont really have a schedule for this, its just a whenever i want to
sort of deal. hope you atleast enjoy some things i have to offer here in the future.